31 July 2006
The Case for Soylent - An Inconvenient Sleuth
In contrast to the smattering of those adamantly ignorant to the inevitable consequences of our Earth's atmosphere having a 33% higher composition of carbon dioxide than at any time in the past half billion years; and despite former next-president Al Gore's idealistic optimism that we can retard or reverse, within in the next critical decade, the geometrically incremental effects that have occurred since the proliferation of the steam engine; it is time to deduce for ourselves and recognize what the likely outcome of our behavior, as bipedal mammals, will be.
The real inconvenient truth is that: until a foreboding omen becomes catastrophic truth, human beings--whether in Congress, Kyoto, or on a street corner--do not act on behalf of their own, long term benefit. Come to grips with the fact that the planet will become less livable and lovable in our lifetime.
Within 30 years, there will be rolling blackouts of the electrical grid that last for days or weeks, not minutes or hours. People who are not able to report to work on foot or by bicycle will become under or unemployed. Burgeoning supermarket shelves will become a thing of the past. Food shortages and riots will become commonplace. Grain supplies will be sporadic, meat of any kind almost nonexistent, and seafood extinct.
As world population grows from 6 to 9 billion while resources dwindle and disappear, life prolonging medicines--all of which are dependent upon living organisms and biochemistry--will become scarce, at best. Abortion, now a bane for most--pro or anti-choice--will become a gristly necessity to many. Suicide will become ignored, if not sponsored. Man's average life span will be foreshortened by decades.
Commercial air travel will virtually disappear; only the one percent or fewer billion-trillionaires, and the very few, very connected will fly. Arable land, and clean water and air, which we now take for granted, will become packaged luxuries. Public water supplies will be stingily rationed to all but those who can afford to install and operate their own energy demanding desalinization-filtration and storage facilities. Breadbaskets like the American midwest will become dusty human reservations, refuges of the undernourished. Urban areas, mostly coastal today, will become sargassos of salvage.
The Arctic ice cap and Oceanic islands will melt and drown. Ocean waves will break upon North American coastlines at the foothills of the Appalachians, the Smokeys and the High Sierras. Pockets of neo-aboriginal communities of people from formerly civilized nations and communities will spawn in the Earth's remotest locations, like the Yukon, the Himalayas and Antarctica. Gangland and tribal mentality, and cannibalism will spread. Regional feuds will break out over possession of a half an acre of dry grass, a glade of scraggly fir trees, or a scummy green pond.
Prognostication has become a non sequiter. Nostradomus and the Book of Revelations are obsolete. Our future arrives with the swiftness with which we sentients fail, or choose not, to see and deal with it.
Have faith, Pilgrim. Procrastinate now. You may not get another chance.
JR Ford
UP (Unsubstantiated Press)
St. Petersburg, Fl.
sixtimeseven@aol.com
"We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world--or to make it the last." -- John F. Kennedy.
"It is not too strong a statement to declare that this is the way civilizations begin to die. None of us has the right to suppose it cannot happen here." -- Richard M. Nixon.
"The Earth has been here 4.5 billion years, doing well without our help. It can take care of itself. It’s solution just may not include homo-sapiens." -- JR Ford, Aug 2005.
02 July 2006
Forrest Bush
In a NY Times OP-ED piece on May 17, 2006, entitled, "Saying No To Bush's Yes Men," Thomas Friedman asked the question: "How could there still be 29 percent of the people who approve of this presidency?"
Good question. I'm not here to answer it, but to pose an alternative question: "How could any intelligent person truly hate George W. Bush?"
That is not to say I approve of his policies--any of them--the man, his character or apparent lack thereof, his philosophy of government, or his attempt to fill the role of president as a D-list understudy. To be sure, only two of the promises made in his 2000 and 2004 election campaigns have come to pass. If not for the War of Terrorism, today Dubyah would be a virtual nobody.
His cronies crassly claim classist tax cuts are responsible for a "strong" economy that is, in reality, propped upon the shoulders of the soldiers occupying Iraq, and the grossly negligent, deficit spending that lines the pockets of military contractors, Wall Street insiders, and other friends of the Halliburton and the Carlisle Group.
The Prescription Drug Act, a.k.a. Medicare Part D, has spiraled the Federal healthcare bureaucracy beyond Hillary Clinton's wildest dreams, provided greater opportunity for mismanagement and fraud than parts A, B, and C combined, and confused the hell out of the intended recipients and their local pharmacists. At the same time it has made pharmaceutical manufacturers richer and more powerful than they have been since before there was any regulation over the industry at all--over 100 years ago--when Cocaine and Marihuana were the primary ingredients in over half of the patent medicines available in this country, and could be purchased out of a Sears Roebuck mail order catalog.
Despite two false promises and a litany (too long to enumerate here) of bumbling failures, mistakes, screwups, illegal abuses of power, bald-faced lies, incompetence of unqualified cronies who are textbook testimony from the Peter Principle, and an inner sanctum of Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld and Rice--whom I affectionately term: the Four Horse Apples of the Apocalypse--I don't hate the man.
To say one hates George W. Bush is equivalent to saying one hates Rainman or Forrest Gump. I don't like him, and I don't think he knows who's on first; but he is an excellent driver and he loves his Momma.
Momma always said: "Life is like a barrel of apples. A body can be sour or be a sweet one. Dubyah, you have to choose whether you are gonna be de vinegar or decider."
JR Ford
UP (Unsubstantiated Press)
St. Petersburg, Fl.
sixtimeseven@aol.com
forty-two
31 May 2006
"Verily I say unto you, to criticize George W. Bush is proverbially: ‘Whipping a dead horse's ass.’" -- JR Ford, Dec 2005.
Pat Robertson Floats Around Flooding
Funny how we have heard no wrath o' gawd condemnation of the blue states from Pat Robertson for 100 year flood levels and the deaths of 16 people.
It may have something to do with the fact that no major urban--typically liberal--communities suffered severely from the storms. Only small towns and rural areas, and Republican Rockville and Laurel, Maryland; red splotches in seas of blue.
42
"Bush invited Pat Robertson to the rental Rancho Pollo Loco in Crawford. In the photo ops Bush was wearing a red plaid shirt & bandana, Robertson was wearing one of those cowboy shirts with embroidery & fringe. Looked just like Howdy Doody and Buffalo Bob." -- JR Ford, Dec 2004.
It may have something to do with the fact that no major urban--typically liberal--communities suffered severely from the storms. Only small towns and rural areas, and Republican Rockville and Laurel, Maryland; red splotches in seas of blue.
42
"Bush invited Pat Robertson to the rental Rancho Pollo Loco in Crawford. In the photo ops Bush was wearing a red plaid shirt & bandana, Robertson was wearing one of those cowboy shirts with embroidery & fringe. Looked just like Howdy Doody and Buffalo Bob." -- JR Ford, Dec 2004.
