Frederik Pohl's Blog, page 7

  View Larger Map Every knows that the principal thing lacking in the poor is the same all over the world. Its name is Money. According to a recent New York Times Magazine, a group of relatively small-scale philanthropists working in a small town in a section of equatorial Africa called Siaya, was studying particularly [...]

    Time lapse photography of the melting of Jorge Montt Glacier, Chile,by the Centro de Estudios Científicos Mountains are getting higher. Way down at the tip of South America, Patagonia’s tall mountains are each getting about an inch and a half taller every year. This isn’t from tectonic activity. It’s because of the rate [...]

  Fracking the shale that holds America’s “inexhaustible” store of hydrocarbons destroys our greatest treasure of aquifers of clean, pure water by poisoning it with deadly chemicals. We don’t dare mine, refine and use it all anyway, because that would push the volume of awful weather disasters past the point of survival for many of [...]

  You’re Killing America’s Future If the Koch Brothers need more money that badly, let one of them get a part-time job.

Nobody likes to have a pig farm in his back yard, not even the people who grow them. They relieve themselves of that pungent pig farm aroma by keeping the pigs a long way from their homes, or indeed from anyone’s. The routine feeding and handling of the animals takes place largely in giant barns, [...]

  I was getting almost accustomed to being almost single again. That is, I don’t mean that there were no female people in my life. There was Carolie Ulf, taking care of the kids just as though her daughter and I were still obsessively married. Then there was Marge, the surgical nurse who supervised the [...]

According to the economist Allen R. Sanderson, writing in Chicago Life, about 40 percent of college graduates have taken at least one economics course and 5 percent have majored in it. Good news, you say? Maybe because you think that a clear understanding of the various flows of money can prevent our ever again having [...]

  When we talked about Occupying in the most effective manner with the fewest people some of you complained that we didn’t say where to deploy our 1 adult, 1 baby Occupying force. That’s because the best answer is Everywhere. Wherever people are, that’s the right place to show that you want those super-deadly rapid-fire [...]

If you’re among that large and growing fraction of our blog readerrs who never miss anything in the blog and never forget anything you haven’t missed, you may recall an occasional musing from me about how much fun (and also how much labor) editing Galaxy and If was. Pay was putrid, work was unending, but [...]

You know, the guy that shot up a bunch of citizens who were peacefully listening to their congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords? Laughner apparently was hoping to assassinate Ms Giffords, probably because she was a Democrat and had the temerity to be one in Arizona. He came pretty close, too. He even put a bullet in her [...]