Icy Bay, Alaska. A century ago, the water of this bay was covered by ice. NASA.   It does not look likely the Biden administration will act in time to forestall the predicted punishing rage of climate change.    The treachery of the Republicans   The country, but especially its political class, is divided sharply as if on the eve of civil war. The so-called Republican senators are united in their opposition to any government measures to diminish the consumption (perpetual burning) of fossil fuels, prime causes of climate chaos.    Even among the Democratic senators, one from West Virginia,  Joe Manchin , denounced Biden’s climate legislation with a projected expenditures of $ 555 billion for building the country’s renewable energy infrastructure against climate catastrophe. Yet Biden was hopeful he could resolve the differences with Manchin, a fierce protector of coal.   The Manchin episode of holding a gun on Biden’s largest effort to do something about the climate danger is paradigma

  Dionysos or man dancing among trees. A bird brings food to fledgelings while a snake and locusts approach (left). East Greek Little Master Cup was made in Samos but found in Etruria. c. 550 BCE. Louvre. Courtesy Wikipedia. Klick on the next link to find yourself almost a participant in a modern version of a very ancient Dionysian tradition of singing and dancing in the small island of Leros in the Aegean Sea. It's beautiful. Καμουτζέλες (Απόκριες, Λέρος) ~ Τρεις καλές γειτόνισσες, Αράπικος, Πιπέρι, Λέρικος, Καριώτικα

  1831 Frontispiece of Mary Shelley's 1816 Frankenstein novel. Frontispiece by Theodore von Holst, 1810-1844. Courtesy Wikipedia.   I am not a climatologist, but I have been writing about the dangers of anthropogenic climate change since 1989. It’s like I sense the danger.    In love with nature   I love the natural world, a love I inherited from reading Aristotle who crafted the science of zoology and kept praising “perfect” nature that does nothing in vain.    I studied zoology at the University of Illinois, but not much of that study stayed with me. Earning a living on Capitol Hill and the US Environmental Protection Agency in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s pretty much shut me down, and almost scared the living daylights out of me.   Ideas and policies   You can go on trying to do good for so long. Without support from enough colleagues or friends, one dries up like a plant in a drought.    Ideas become policies only when there’s a consensus for their validity and urgency and

Young Athenian woman, paradigm of kalon k' agathon, the beautiful and the good. About 500 BCE. Courtesy Acropolis Museum, Athens, Greece. By Evaggelos Vallianatos   My early hopes of finding long-term happiness in America were illusions of a young man who knew nothing about the United States, save for giving opportunities to immigrants from Greece.     The crisis of America   In 2021, American politics and  Constitution  are on the verge of civil war. The Democrats and Republicans are irreconcilable. The Democratic Party represents for the most part the white middle class, including non-white minorities. The Republican Party, a subsidiary of Trump, fights for the interests of an oligarchy of rich and powerful whites.   Behind both of these gigantic parties, and the national political divisions they generate, there lurk the few billionaires that pull the policy strings, including those of the January 6, 2021 insurrection. The Republicans obey  Trump  who instigated the invasion of t

Cover of The Antikythera Mechanism by Evaggelos G. Vallianatos, Universal Publishers, 2021.  I also add a very brief video in which I explain why I wrote this book: https://youtu.be/_Hnk_uVirTk  

Medusa by Caravaggio, 1596. Wikipedia.   Humans thirst for certainty as they do for water. They want to know what to expect for tomorrow. They keep talking to each other to assure understanding, friendship, cooperation, and political, military, and commercial relations.   Wars, bad governments, gross inequalities, and natural upheavals unsettle civilization and personal and national certainty about the present and the future.    The Peloponnesian War   The fifth century BCE Peloponnesian War, for example, disrupted the “golden” age of Athens when everything seemed to be going its way: spreading its democratic culture and advancing science and the good and the beautiful.   However, the rising primacy of Athens rubbed Sparta the wrong way. Here was the Greek superpower outdistanced by Athens. Sparta did not take that kindly. Invincible Sparta did not try to learn why Athens was doing so well, why certainty had gained so much ground in Athens. Like a troubled tyrant, Sparta declared war o

 Ancient Greek theater, Stratos, Central Greece. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos By Evaggelos Vallianatos   The 200-years of modern Greek history mirror the lives of people trying to be free.   The Greek Revolution   After four centuries of degrading Turkish occupation, the Greeks went against the post-Napoleonic “holy alliance” and master-slave order of Europe favoring the Turks and other tyrants. They fought the European-trained and European-armed troops of Turkey to a standstill, defeating them most of the time.    In October 1827, the embarrassed European powers (England, France and Russia) finally intervened and smashed the Turkish-Egyptian fleet at Navarino, Peloponnesos, thus boosting the Greek cause for political independence.    In 1828, Russia went to war against Turkey not on behalf of the Greek revolutionaries but because the Sultan blocked the passage of Russian ships through the Dardanelles. Russia won and, in the terms of the Treaty of Adrianople of 1829, Greece became an i