Dear President Biden, We’re starting Day 3 of our weather-related, housebound holiday vacation and as grateful as I am that we have a house in which to be bound and that the power has somehow stayed on throughout, this is not exactly the winter break we’d envisioned. Fortunately we got two hikes in on Christmas …
Touching base
Dear President Biden, Thank you for the two semi-personalized responses to my letters your people sent recently. Somebody had to dig a bit to get the salutation right since I don’t think I’ve clicked on that field at all in months and months. The especially specific salutation was the main clue that the responses were …
We can’t live together because we don’t really want to
Dear President Biden, Happy New Fiscal Year’s Eve! And nice job getting the stopgap-funding bill signed before we all turned into pumpkins. I know it was just a can kicking exercise and we’ll be facing the same demonic BS from the GOP on the debt ceiling in October and a real funding bill will have …
Continue reading "We can’t live together because we don’t really want to"
Worth doing
Dear President Biden, It had been coming on for a bit, but I finally hit a pretty low point yesterday evening as I considered the enormity of what we’re facing and how, even at the micro-relational level, people can’t seem to get along. All day I’d been hearing stories about people yelling at those they’re …
May we not run out of AMOC
Dear President Biden, Had you heard of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) system before last week? Or, to be fair to the rest of us mere mortals who aren’t oceanographers or presidents – how about before you elected to be elected to serve as America’s Safeguarder-In-Chief? Well, before I made myself read the WP …
Rounding error, walking intersections, and new fires
Dear President Biden, For several days I’ve been saving two ideas from two very different sources that on their faces don’t seem to marry up especially well. I’ve kept them perched up here at the top of the Word document where I write my letters to you and I’ve been scrolling past them the last …
Continue reading "Rounding error, walking intersections, and new fires"
Even Mother Nature doesn’t have a magic wand
Dear President Biden, It’s not much and I’m definitely not proud of what it says about my past reading habits, but the last several weeks I’ve been making myself open and read all the climate change/environmental disaster articles I come across instead of blazing through the headline and scrolling past. Some days there’s not a …
Continue reading "Even Mother Nature doesn’t have a magic wand"
We share this place
Dear President Biden, So, we topped out at 100 yesterday. The forecast for today is 99 but since yesterday was only supposed to get to 91, I’m thinking we’re likely to blow past 99. We’ll see. Before I got up this morning Laura did all sorts of things to mitigate the heat build up – …
Waiving patent rights calls for an awesome PR campaign
Dear President Biden, I’m so happy to see that you and your administration have come around to the humanitarian and highly practical decision to waive the patent rights on the coronavirus vaccines – well done! I know there’s a lot more wrangling, hashing out, and parsing of language that needs to happen before the thing …
Continue reading "Waiving patent rights calls for an awesome PR campaign"
“The future is harm reduction”
Dear President Biden, One aspect of the endless construction on the street in front of our house is that there are lots of big orange-on-one-side-silvery-on-the-other-side signs for directing traffic, including some that aren’t in use and are just leaning up against the chain link fence just outside the park across the street. The other morning …
The Biden Letters 