15 Jul 24 Monday Briefing

Bubbles, Bugs, Toil and Troubles

News Roundup

Friends, I thought I could highlight the tragic hilarity of elder abuse at last week’s NATO summit and be done with the news roundup section, but alas, a fine specimen of American manhood took potshots at a man reviled by at least half his compatriots that just… missed. Look, I’m irreverent, snarky, even sardonic, but hopefully not cruel… so when I say how the hell did Crooks miss, I mean it; I’m not convinced this whole incident wasn’t staged. Even I am a better shot and I live in a land where people are not permitted to own firearms.

My take: I was still willing to give Biden a shot at winning the US election, but after this weekend, I’ll gift signed e-copies of my as-yet-unwritten-book to all readers if Trump doesn’t sweep the stakes. P. S. I have little skin in this game. Unlike Noah Smith, a politically unstable US is hardly awful to me and many others around the world who grew up in a unipolar world – like, will we be the next ones invaded for weapons of mass destruction or have our leaders coup’d because they said no thanks or get slapped with sanctions? Yeah, nah, mate.

Nevertheless, since I am the sort to respect my intrusive thoughts’ freedom of speech, here is the best meme sequence from the NATO summit.

The farcically funny thing is that Zelenskyy had to take this lying down. The less funny thing was NATO deciding to sneak a couple of lines into a very boring document about China being a “decisive enabler”, to which China strenuously objected.

Another major news item out of Singapore was the approval of 16 insect species for human consumption. To give you an idea about how much groundwork is laid before something like that is even passed, here’s a CNA feature from two years ago about eating bugs. I’ve been told toasted mealworms taste like popcorn, and I can’t wait to try a salted caramel version.

Watch/Scroll

Those pretty-looking leather products you see in every Italian market is in fact… mostly Nigerian leather. (h/t my partner via X)

Read

What are the implications of “peak population”, and how might that relate to the planet future generations will inherit? (See Deep Time Walk section below).

Ponder

We humans love our bubbles, don’t we, from kids playing with bubble machines at yesterday’s Bastille Day pool party to tulips to the South Sea and Japan in the 1980s. Japan is back in the news again, with a persistently weak yen and its looming debt crisis.

Crazy numbers don’t tell the whole story, but they do indicate a worrying trend in Singapore about inequality, both in hard numbers and the social aspect of mobility. (h/t my partner via X)

Deep Time Walk

“Progress is, in many ways, overrated.” – H.G. Wells to Myka Bering, Warehouse 13 Season 2 Episode 7

What I really, really wanted to share in this Monday’s newsletter was my experience yesterday at Singapore’s second ever Deep Time Walk, raising funds in aid of the soon-to-be-displaced indigenous peoples living in Rempang, Batam Island. I went into it expecting to get very hot and bothered, and I was, but more emotionally than physically. Walking 4.6km through what scarce greenery Singapore has, stopping at 18 earth stations signifying different stops through our planet’s 4.6 billion years of history, moved me in ways that I am still processing.

Learning about cyanobacteria and snowballs and dinosaurs was fun, but coming to grips with how much humans have triggered the 6th mass extinction event we are headed into, hyper-accelerated over the past 250 years was a lot less fun. Group members shared emotions of acceptance, anger, anxiety, resignation and even hope – that future generations would not have to live shorter, sadder lives if we would only work together in the present to tackle these massive systemic challenges.

If you have a Deep Time Walk community where you live, I highly recommend going on one.