Marc Hudson

@marchudson.bsky.social

4494 Followers 2134 Following

Failing/ed academic (socio-technical transitions), climate historian, writer, video maker. Most days I think we're toast. #envhist See also allouryesterdays.info @allouryesterdays.bsky.social

Oh heavens no, I’m not bitter Although the planet’s in the shitter Cos were it not for Lords and Masters Well we’d be facing real disasters In wisdom, leadership and grace They have saved the human race Avoided pits of fire and ash And given most a boost of cash There was, she said, no other way And as I see my grave today I’m glad to say that she was Right And crushed the left, the Satan-lite.
Last week, I emailed a (previously?) respectable journal in my field to let them know that a recent article I had been hoping to cite had hallucinated hashtag#AI references and that the author should be asked to update their article with credible citations to support their arguments. Someone from the admin team responded to say, basically, that they weren't going to do anything about it. I feel like this is how academic credibility dies. The main recourse I have in the face of AI slop is academic papers. If you can't trust journal articles to contain established evidence (even though the system has never been perfect) then I don't know how we can make policy recommendations, advise NGOs and charities, design credible experiments, etc., etc. My only hope is that this is the trigger that begins to kill the profiteering publishing system and the 'quantity over quality' performance criteria under which we all are drowning - but I have a feeling that all of academia will need an overhaul to maintain any kind of credibility.
The war was hot, the war was cold Most learned to do as they were told They rode us hard, we rode our luck They toyed with nukes, we'd cover, duck. In sixty two and eighty three The end almost came to be So drenched with fear; climate rose To be the end, instead of blows. The track is ruts, our leaders nuts The wagon's axles creak and groan Our time is up, no ifs or buts. We'll die together, we'll die alone.
Screengrab of spreadsheet showing that I am reading/narrating and blogging Ovid's metamorphoses.
Photo of Freedom House Emergency Ambulance staff around an ambulance.
Born in Vienna in 1924, Safar was drafted into Adolf Hitler’s army despite his Jewish ancestry. In 1943, he was nearly sent to fight on the Eastern Front; he escaped deployment by smearing himself with an ointment that inflamed his eczema. He began studying medicine and emigrated to the United States in 1949. He settled in Baltimore, where he practiced medicine and studied resuscitation. Safar discovered that adding direct ventilation—now called mouth-to-mouth—to the already established practice of chest compressions exponentially increased the chance of survival for a patient in cardiac arrest. Though Safar is now hailed as the father of CPR, the medical establishment initially disagreed with his notion that the method could, maybe even should, be taught to private citizens. To prove them wrong, Safar paralyzed volunteers with curare, the compound used by Amazonian tribes to make poison-tipped arrows, and trained Boy Scouts kept them breathing using only mouth-to-mouth. Gradually, across America, ordinary people began using CPR.
Freedom House Ambulance Service's request to expand their contract with the city to cover additional parts of the city was denied by the mayor, despite their strong record.[6][5] This denied them the chance to serve more affluent neighborhoods in which they would likely have been more able to collect the fees they charged for ambulance service.[5] During Flaherty's time as Mayor, the city began providing payment for the ambulance contract late,[5] and cut its portion of the ambulance service's operating budget by 50%.[2][5] Flaherty also signed an ordinance barring the use of ambulance sirens in the downtown area, with noise complaints given as the reason.[5][2][3] This slowed the paramedics when transporting patients to hospitals as well as their response time, allowing the police to reach more calls before them.[5] In 1974, the Mayor announced plans for a citywide ambulance system to be staffed by police officers trained as paramedics.[5] Faced with resistance from city council member Eugene DePasquale, the mayor agreed to fund the Freedom House Ambulance Service contract for one more year.[5] At the end of the year, the Mayor then announced the creation of a citywide ambulance service to be staffed by non-police paramedics and the end of the contract with Freedom House.[2][5] Closure The Freedom House Ambulance Service closed on October 15, 1975.[5] All of the paramedics initially hired to staff the new city ambulance service which succeeded it were white.[5][2] Then the previous medical director of the Freedom House Ambulance Service, Dr. Nancy Caroline, accepted a position
Two panel cartoon Burnham opening door of number 10, being told by army officer "Welcome Mr Burnham - I must give you the briefing all Prime Ministers receive upon entering Downing Street. Second panel is army officer stroking a cat that is eating "His litter tray is in the Cabinet Office and he needs feeding at least twice a day. He likes..."
1935 review (squib) about Storm Jameson pamphlet "The Soul of Man in the Age of Leisure"
Advert for the Rhythm Theory
Viz magazine cartoon Baxter Basics investigation of nepotism, Feb 2021
Reference: MEPO 2/10978 Description: British Union of Fascists: Meeting at Olympia on 7 June 1934 and protest demonstration by Communist Party of Great Britain reports, correspondence and press cuttings. Includes reports from Special Branch outlining the injuries sustained by those present at Olympia, followed by descriptions by three medical doctors in attendance. There are also cuttings from the Daily Worker protesting about the broadcasting of Oswald Mosley´s speech by the BBC and a pamphlet of eyewitness accounts prepared in the aftermath of the meeting. Among those providing accounts were the authors Naomi Mitchison, Aldous Huxley and Vera Brittain.
Every late rentier society in history has responded to the behaviours of Conspicuous Despair in the same way: by locating their cause in the character of the despairing, rather than the structure that despairs them. This is not a coincidence. It is, structurally, the only available move for the propertied class, because the alternative explanations implicate the propertied class itself. Late Republican Rome blamed the moral softness of the urban plebs while the latifundia consolidated the agricultural smallholdings that had been the basis of the Roman citizen-soldier. Tiberius Gracchus, who tried to point this out, was beaten to death with the legs of broken benches by his fellow senators. His brother Gaius, who tried again a decade later, was hunted down and killed on the Aventine. The senatorial class understood, with the clarity that self-interest provides, that the diagnosis was the problem, not the disease. To name the cause was to threaten the structure. Late Qing China blamed the opium-smoking peasantry for the dynasty’s military weakness, while the gentry-bureaucratic class extracted ever-larger rents from the agricultural surplus, the imperial examination system calcified into a closed shop, and the Qing court spent the indemnity from the First Sino-Japanese War on the Empress Dowager’s Summer Palace.
Screengrab of BBC story about Rupert Lowe, Restore leader. David Wallace Lockhart Scotland political correspondent Published 9 July 2026, 11:03 BST Updated 2 hours ago The leader of Restore Britain has been urged to apologise after describing the Dunblane school shooting as "one murder". Rupert Lowe was criticising the UK's ban on handguns during an appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast. He said the ban came after "there was a murder in Dunblane". Host Rogan clarified with Lowe that the ban was due to "one murder" and the Restore UK leader repeated that was the case. Sixteen children and their teacher were killed in the 1996 mass shooting at Dunblane Primary School, one of the worst gun atrocities to happen in the UK.
So Jove and Juno fooling ‘round And Jove complained “I sweat the pound; I bet you dames enjoy the fuck More than men.” “Boy, don’t press your luck” said the horny J; “ask Tiresias.” (He’d had and been a piece of ass; he’d found two snakes a-writhing on t’job And ‘tween the two a stick did lob. And for that crime he’d been a bint For seven years he’d served a stint. And then he’d seen the snakes once more And begged reversal [a dick to score]) Tiresias knew of what ‘he’ spoke He told the truth – and Juno choked She tore his eyes out one by one A tragic end to a non-binary ‘son.’ Now Jove could not this deed undo A consolation prize did he brew And “foresight” did Jove give to him That’s no good, in fact it’s grim!
So Jove and Juno were fooling ‘round When he complained “I do all the pound. I bet you dames enjoy the fuck More than men” “Boy don’t press your luck” replied the horny wife. Let’s ask Tiresias (He’d had and been a piece of ass; He’d found two snakes who were on the job And between the two a stick did lob And for the crime he’d become a bint For seven years he served a stint. And then he’d seen the snakes again And begged reversal [a dick to gain] So Tiresias knew of what he spoke) He told the truth - and Juno choked She tore his eyes out one by one A tragic end to a non-binary one Now Jove, by law, could not this deed undo A consolation prize he did brew The gift of foresight was given him That’s no good, in fact it’s grim!
1909 Cartoon "Suffragettes at Home" A room of respectable men and women having tea. At the far right is a glum young woman, arms crossed. Caption is "He: I say, that lady over there looks rather out of it. "She: Yes, you see, most of us here have been in prison two or three times, and she, poor dear, has only been bound over!"
Environmental Impacts of a Car cartoon by Andy Singer
Perhaps it was Marlow who was at fault. His habit of mind was a trifle sedentary. He had sat upon deck too long; splendid in soliloquy, he was less apt in the give and take of conversation; and those “moments of vision” flashing and fading, do not serve as well as steady lamplight to illume the ripple of life and its long, gradual years. Woolf, p.216
The Fafocene
Third Test Match, Trent Bridge New Zealand 0-140 (35.2 overs)
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More worryingly, though, was that THE GAP also seemed to weirdly legitimise failure as a form of success. When Extinction Rebellion stormed the conference at the end of the day, shouting out to the now depleted audience, ‘do more, faster, now’, and ‘we demand more’ their critique had already been dampened by THE GAP that already anticipated this call to action. Unfazed, Burnham muted their urgent cries by giving them the microphone and inviting them to put their views across, telling us he couldn’t agree with them more. I don’t doubt his sincerity, but perhaps it is important to do more now than just acknowledge, with policy makers, a gap between strategies and projections. The suffragettes and the civil rights movement didn’t call for a % increase in rights by a certain date. They called for absolute changes now. As Lemn Sissay puts it ‘a lost number in the equation, a simple understandable miscalculation – and what if on the basis of that the world as we knew it changed its matter of fact – let me get it right – what if we got it wrong?’ If we are going to rise to the challenge Andy Burnham posed to hold GM to account and to ask them to do more, perhaps what we need is a different calculation to that of the policy makers, one that demands not that we gradually try to close THE GAP – but that we challenge city regions like GM to confront absolutes. We have had Manchester Nuclear Free City – what if we were to aim not for a ‘net-zero carbon Manchester by 2038’, but dared to demand an absolute change, something like ‘Fossil Free GM’. Perhaps now the time has come to replace indicators with infrastructures, pledges with planning legislation, and ever receding futures with a now measured only against itself.
Photo of algae growing in reflecting pool
But these internal questions are not going to evaporate. Far from being committed to “Labour winning” under any banner, many in Labour have proven their fealty to an extremely unpopular, losing politics that mostly concerns shaping Labour into an organization suitable for corporate interests. Of the 2024 Labour parliamentary intake, at least seventy MPs have worked as professional lobbyists, with many working for water companies, gambling giants, and property developers. That is more than double the number of MPs who were former union officials, and a significant percentage of figures who would be worse off living in a better country.
On another level, I have no doubt at all that the mostly-pointless academics who wang on about ‘multi-species entanglements’ and ‘more-than-human’ are already submitting abstracts to upcoming conferences with titles like “Reflecting more-than-human agency: Trump, Contested Monumentalism and the Anthropocene.” Shoot me now.
I lived in Manchester for a good part of Andy the Mayor’s first term. He’s very good at making big shiny promises (e.g. around climate change and emissions reductions) and then blaming central government and creating other promises to soothe credulous dupes who want to be duped, who want ‘vibes.’ He’s very good at absorbing criticism and turning on the earnest ‘nice’ Andy (see how in early 2019 he handled the ‘school strikers’ who came on stage at the Green Summit). See here, from Hannah Knox More worryingly, though, was that THE GAP also seemed to weirdly legitimise failure as a form of success. When Extinction Rebellion stormed the conference at the end of the day, shouting out to the now depleted audience, ‘do more, faster, now’, and ‘we demand more’ their critique had already been dampened by THE GAP that already anticipated this call to action. Unfazed, Burnham muted their urgent cries by giving them the microphone and inviting them to put their views across, telling us he couldn’t agree with them more. I don’t doubt his sincerity, but perhaps it is important to do more now than just acknowledge, with policy makers, a gap between strategies and projections. (emphasis added) I suspect he may find the weight of expectation and scrutiny that comes with the top job a little more trying.
Screengrab of last panel of First Dog on the Moon cartoon about social media bans. Caption says When today's youths are all 60 big chunks of the planet will be uninhabitable. Let's fix that!
In some ways she was far more acute than Winston, and far less susceptible to Party propaganda. Once when he happened in some connexion to mention the war against Eurasia, she startled him by saying casually that in her opinion the war was not happening. The rocket bombs which fell daily on London were probably fired by the Government of Oceania itself, 'just to keep people frightened'. This was an idea that had literally never occurred to him.
Screengrab from Guardian article Starbucks branded the date of its promotion “Tank Day”. It also featured the slogan “thwack on the desk”, evoking a notorious police explanation for the 1987 torture death of student activist Park Jong-chul. Authorities falsely claimed he had died after an officer “hit the desk with a thwack” during questioning. Marketers chose the “thwack” slogan after consulting an AI tool for suggestions, Shinsegae Group said. It turned out some managers who approved the campaign never opened the email attachments showing the marketing material.
"The alternatives are stark. Either we will have a future in which humans are reduced to a sort of bee-like behaviour, reacting to the systems and equipment specified for them, or we will have a future in which masses of people, conscious of their skills in both a political and technical sense, decide they are going to the architects of a new form of technological development which will enhance human creativity and mean more freedom of expression." Mike Cooley, 'Architect or Bee? The Human/Technology Relationship.'
Disease outbreaks are becoming more likely due to the climate crisis and armed conflict, while collective action is being undermined by geopolitical fragmentation and commercial self-interest, the report said. In fact, it’s more or less Musk again—he made a joke at a presidential cabinet meeting about “accidentally” cutting Ebola funding, but insisted it had been restored, something that—and this will shock you—seems not to be entirely true. In Geneva, Prof Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Georgetown University Center for Global Health Policy & Politics, said aid cuts may have played a role in leaving the world “playing catch-up against a very dangerous pathogen”. He said: “Because early tests looked for the wrong strain of Ebola, we got false negatives and lost weeks of response time. By the time the alarm was raised, the virus had already moved along major transport routes and crossed borders. “This crisis didn’t happen in a vacuum. When you pull billions out of the WHO and dismantle frontline USAID programmes, you gut the exact surveillance system meant to catch these viruses early. We are seeing the direct, deadly consequences of treating global health security as an optional expense.” That margin is thinner all the time. Consider this report from Laura Paddison
macro of sloth sat on chair in front of large ring binder note pad, with the slogan what am I even doing here?
cover of Bitter Wash Road by Garry Disher.
My thumb and page 74 of Orbital.
We often talk about outback noir as a variation on the American Western: the saloon swapped for the pub, the horses for utes. A world of lone heroes and dusty, frontier justice. It’s an easy comparison to make, but often cosmetic, and impossible to sustain without acknowledging the full story of that frontier. The story Harper is writing (and rewriting) is far closer to the English country-house mystery: the illusion of isolation, a closed circle of suspects, a fixation on moral respectability. The house is simply deconstructed, its rooms spread across a whole town.
Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.
Map of Australia, from the Pentagon's perspective
Covers of four books
A good friend recently pointed me at a very good (imo, ymmv obvs) article "education for democratic resilience." It's full of quotable bits but for now Imma riff on this - "I believe one reason is that too few Americans understand the nuts-and-bolts of associations. An initial meeting often draws many concerned people, who may use the time to express strong feelings and to share ideas, some of which are excellent. But nothing concrete is decided. The second meeting draws some of the same people along with many newbies and recapitulates the first discussion. By the third meeting, most people are too frustrated to continue. The group needed an agenda, a committee of accountable, volunteer leaders, a decision-making process, and a budget." This is - from three decades of observing/participating in social movement organisations in the UK (and reading/communicating about others in other countries) - true. I've developed concepts like the smugosphere and the emotacycle (among others) to get at the underlying reasons why. (See the end of the post for a very small selection of posts about these dilemmas). But the problem - as I see it - is that we can't solve this problem until we've solved this problem. (And we can't solve this problem). Because for people to be attracted to a campaigning group that has a specific goal and a "committee of accountable volunteer leaders", a "decision-making process" that isn't about the pub afterwards/Whatsapps between the real power-brokers, they have to have previous experience of groups that haven't experience one of the following fates.
Picture of Orwell with the following text we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
The entire post-1973 petrodollar deal was simple: Gulf sells oil in dollars, America provides the security umbrella. The umbrella is on fire. The refineries are on fire. And according to an Omani journalist on BBC Arabic, Trump has sent an invoice: $5 trillion to continue the war, $2.5 trillion to stop it. The petrodollar was already the payment. This is double-billing for a service that is visibly, combustibly, failing.
The United States is sending 5,000 Marines into the Persian Gulf to seize Kharg Island, a speck of land 15 miles off the Iranian coast that handles 90% of Iran’s oil exports. This is, on paper, a reasonable military objective in the same way that sticking your hand into a beehive is a reasonable way to acquire honey. It is technically correct. The bees would disagree.
screen grab of bsky conversation where someone clearly doesn't know the difference between Martin Luther and Martin Luther King.
Pattern Recognition The fundamental function of all animal brains is to encode and integrate information acquired from the environment, then generate adaptive behavioral responses.[1] Sensory information is encoded as patterns inherent in inputs—visual and auditory patterns being most extensively studied—and these encoded patterns can be recalled, compared, and manipulated to guide decision-making.[2] What researchers term ‘superior pattern processing’ (SPP) has become exceptionally sophisticated in humans through expansion of the cerebral cortex, particularly the prefrontal cortex and regions involved in image processing.[3] This enhanced capacity enables not merely recognizing patterns in the environment, but also generating novel patterns—imagining scenarios that don’t yet exist, fabricating possibilities, and then transferring complex patterns to other individuals through language.[4] Awareness of faltering societal systems and narratives therefore begins as a pattern-recognition. Before it becomes analysis, advocacy, or grief, it is simply the act of registering that the cultural narrative no longer matches observable reality. The story of perpetual growth on a finite planet, of technological salvation arriving just in time, of political systems gradually correcting their course—these narratives fail even basic coherence tests. Yet most people never register the failure. This isn’t primarily about intelligence. It’s about the patterns one’s cognitive apparatus is oriented to detect, and what filtering mechanisms shape perception before it reaches conscious awareness. Decades of research demonstrates that people can arrive at starkly different perceptions of identical situations.[5] In a classic study, football fans watching the same game reported vastly different accounts based on team affiliation—different enough that
Darth Vader doing choke on Imperial officer "I find your lack of all conviction disturbing"
An anti-pattern is a solution to a class of problem which may be commonly used but is likely to be ineffective or counterproductive.[1][2] The term, coined in 1995 by Andrew Koenig, was inspired by the book Design Patterns which highlights software development design patterns that its authors consider to be reliable and effective.[3] A paper in 1996 presented by Michael Ackroyd at the Object World West Conference described anti-patterns.[3] It was, however, the 1998 book AntiPatterns that both popularized the idea and extended its scope beyond the field of software design to include software architecture and project management.[3] Other authors have extended it further since to encompass environmental, organizational, and cultural anti-patterns.[4] According to the authors of Design Patterns, there are two key aspects of an anti-pattern that distinguish it from a bad habit, bad practice, or bad idea. First, an anti-pattern is a commonly used process, structure or pattern of action that, despite initially appearing to be appropriate and effective, has more bad consequences than good ones. Second, another solution exists to the problem that the anti-pattern is attempting to address. This solution is documented, repeatable, and proven to be effective where the anti-pattern is not. A guide to what is commonly used is a "rule-of-three" similar to that for patterns: to be an anti-pattern it must have been witnessed occurring at least three times.[5] Documenting anti-patterns can be an effective way to analyze a problem space and to capture expert knowledge.[6] While some anti-pattern descriptions merely document the adverse consequences of the pattern, good anti-pattern documentation also provides an alternative, or a means to ameliorate the anti-pattern.[7] Examples In software engineering
Screen grab of announcement that "Due to late-breaking regional upheaval, today's event, "Gaza's Reconstruction: A Conversation on Water, Energy, and Infrastructure with EcoPeace Middle East," originally scheduled for March 2 from 12:00–1:00 PM, has been postponed."
Third, Starmer revived Labour’s campaign claim about the Greens being extremist. (See 11.33am.) This obviously failed to work for Labour in Gorton and Denton. And if Starmer had been watching Zack Polanski and Hannah Spencer at their press conference a few minutes earlier, he might have paused to reconsider. Polanski is not Jeremy Corbyn. And trying to depict Spencer as a an extremist is a total lost cause, as will be obvious to anyone who heard even a short clip of her victory speech. (See 8.29am.)
Cat sat on human