Valentine's Day Post

In honor of Valentine's Day, I want to send all my feelings of love and caring for humanity out into the world.

Ok, so much for that. What part of "curmudgeon" don't you understand? I mean, let's face it, people are jerks. Not all of them, but I'll bet there aren't many who don't at least act like jerks once in a while.

I mean really. We've been at this civilization business for what? Maybe six or eight thousand years? THOUSAND! Yet we still argue about whether or not we can tax the super-rich so we can provide some relief to people who don't have a place to live or enough food to eat. 

I know the counter-argument is that if we tax the wealthy too much, they'll get all sulky and stop creating jobs for the rest of us. Yeah, that's worked out really well. Think about the richest man in the world, Bill Gates. At one point, he was worth $60 billion. BILLION! Then he decided to do some good in the world (maybe to make up for unleashing Windows), and started the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, helping cure disease in the third world and improve education everywhere. What a humanitarian! He made such a huge sacrifice, that today, he's only the richest person in the world, worth ... $60 billion. BILLION!

And how about the need to dredge up dead dinosaur guck and schlep it all over the world in boats, trains and pipelines, so everybody can drive his or her SUV to the gym. If the ships and trains and pipelines leak, we spill dinosaur guck and poison the land and kill wildlife. And if they don't leak, we burn the stuff in our cars and poison the air and kill wildlife. And the planet.

I'm sorry. I hadn't had my coffee yet. What I meant to say was Happy Valentine's Day!

Earth Trek

Earth Day 2013

As far as the environment goes, we're like kids living in a candy house. It's beautiful, and it protects us, but we're going to eat it anyway. Even those of us who claim to be sensitive to environmental issues, while throwing our $5.00 Starbucks cups out the windows of our SUVs, could stand to be a little more aware.

I don't exempt myself here. In fact, the older I get, the more paper towels I seem to go through during the course of a day. Perhaps I'm a late-blooming klutz, but I prefer to think in more scientific terms. It's increasing entropy.

On the other hand, we are completely unable to comprehend any threat that's more than about an hour and a half in the future. This was demonstrated yet again last week when the U.S. Senate chose not even to vote on a gun buyer background check bill the same week that the country was in an uproar about the Boston Marathon bombing fueled by ... gunpowder!

In fact, everything we do is reactive, instead of proactive. Terrorists hijack some planes, so we start locking the cockpit door. A guy tries to blow up his shoes, so we make passengers take their shoes off at the airport. I'm convinced the underwear bomber was just a way of seeing how far we would go.

But as Pogo so eloquently said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Imagine a science fiction movie in which hostile aliens comes upon a planet where the dominant species spends most of its time converting petroleum into plastic and carbon dioxide, and then discards the plastic and releases the CO₂ into the air. No need to conquer that planet. Just wait a while.

So if we can't, as a nation or as a species, avert an environmental calamity, what can we do as individuals?  There are a few possibilities:

1) Save up to buy oceanfront property in Ohio or Nevada.

2) Take pictures of the nighttime sky, so when a younger generation says, "I loved Star Wars and Star Trek, but what the hell are stars?" you can show them.

3) Try to hasten "The Singularity," when we can endow robots with human intelligence (and then some, hopefully.)

4) Dispose of that Starbucks cup properly, so you can tell yourself you're a good person.