Anthropocene - the age of humans - a time when people will determine the future and the survivability of their own kind without directly considering the vagaries of nature. A time when humans will decide whether or not the world remains a place where humans can live.
We're fucked unless we figure some things out.
end our use of fossil fuels
shift to a system of food production that reduces our reliance on meat proteins and puts less pressure on fresh water resources
manage the oceans
Preserve current wild lands, and allow some of the developed lands to return to a wild state
The short version is all about reversing the typical bullshit that says we have to accept The Tragedy Of The Commons as gospel and inevitable.
As we worry about the Rise Of The Machines and Climate Change and the currently occurring Extinction Event, let's not ignore the ability of Earth's Plant Life to engineer and facilitate our demise. From BBC:
The more genes in your genome, the more highly evolved you are as a species. We have a scorecard that shows humans lagging rather badly:
Homo Sapiens: 26,000 genes
Rice: 45,000 genes
A few things I really like thinking about because of this:
There are 650 species of carnivorous plants that we know of
A plant keeps its head below ground and displays its sexual organs to the outside world
If we associate intelligence with the ability to earn the right to survive, we may be in for some very rude surprises
Not content with billions of dollars in profits from the potent painkiller OxyContin, its maker explored expanding into an “attractive market” fueled by the drug’s popularity — treatment of opioid addiction, according to previously secret passages in a court document filed by the state of Massachusetts.
In internal correspondence beginning in 2014, Purdue Pharma executives discussed how the sale of opioids and the treatment of opioid addiction are “naturally linked” and that the company should expand across “the pain and addiction spectrum,” according to redacted sections of the lawsuit by the Massachusetts attorney general. A member of the billionaire Sackler family, which founded and controls the privately held company, joined in those discussions and urged staff in an email to give “immediate attention” to this business opportunity, the complaint alleges.
ProPublica reviewed the scores of redacted paragraphs in Massachusetts’ 274-page civil complaint against Purdue, eight Sackler family members, company directors and current and former executives, which alleges that they created the opioid epidemic through illegal deceit. These passages remain blacked out at the company’s request after the rest of the complaint was made public on Jan. 15. A Massachusetts Superior Court judge on Monday ordered that the entire document be released, but the judge gave Purdue until Friday to seek a further stay of the ruling.
The short-hand version of Mike's General Theory of Economics (and at the risk of indulging myself in at least a couple of Logical Fallacies):
I'm a capitalist because god is a capitalist.
Capitalism is the closest approximation of "the natural order of things".
To survive, I have to take in a number of calories sufficient to fuel the work necessary to find my next meal.
I should also try to put aside a little something for that rainy day when no matter how much work I do, I get nothing.
But here comes the first part of the greater truth that the Radical Libertarians always ignore in their attempts to rationalize their shitty behavior, which are driven by their equally shitty attitudes:
God also gave me a pancreas to make sure my blood sugar level - boosted by those calories I'm taking in - is regulated. Sugar is a good thing, but without a well-timed little blast of insulin it's going to kill me. Sugar's good. Insulin's good. Too much of either sugar or insulin - and I fuckin' die.
And god provided me with a nice big brain so I can recognize the absolute need for that regulation - the need for balance - along with the need to incorporate that awareness into whatever philosophies or ideologies I might come up with.
Which leads to a second part: We're not the same as all those other life forms (that pesky big brain thing again). An adult male bear will kill and eat the cubs of another bear as part of his effort to mate with a female and get his genes into the next generation of bears. That's the natural order of things - for bears.
The natural order of things is brutal. And while it seems cruel, without the necessary self-awareness, it's just how that part of the universe works.
But humans are self-aware, and because of that self-awareness, we have to know that emulating certain animal behavior is a conscious decision, and so it can be rightly identified as cruelty.
We should try to make more of an effort to be a little smarter than the average bear.
I think it's easy to see why some people scoff at the notion of Global Climate Shift.
They look at these graphs (eg) and they see about a 1°C rise over 150 years - having heard the semi-panic in "the liberal voices of the left" about the catastrophe coming if it rises another 1 or 2 degrees.
I hear this one all time: "It takes 150 years to go up 1°, so in the next 150-200 years - before it's a real problem - they'll come up with something to fix it and make it OK."
Of course, that's old news because the pace is accelerating, and the point of no return is not just closer than they figured a few years ago, but could be right on top of us now.
Most "conservatives" I know aren't big on Continuing Education, preferring the comfortably numb position of assuming all that new stuff is just Political Correctness. Plus the voices coming from "the right" have been telling them for 30 years it's all nonsense because "the truth is always somewhere in the middle", and they buy into that shit even when it's a question of 2+2=4 vs 2+2=6. So they can blow it off as just more political noise that they don't need to worry about.
We get so conditioned that when we see the "once-in-a-lifetime storm" is happening about every 2 or 3 years, we can regard each one as the anomaly instead of understanding that this freaky shit is actually the new norm.
I think that - along with some other things - is starting to change.
Because the pendulum swings.
Want to see 168 years of climate change in two minutes?
While we're having to waste time arguing over stoopid shit that should be obvious to a cave snail, we've got a problem that is fast-becoming truly unsolvable.
Cape Morris Jesup at the northern tip of Greenland just registered a temperature of +6 C (43 F). Here is a map of the parts of Europe that are currently colder than the northernmost weather station on Earth. pic.twitter.com/8LoJjSxGxL
Live Science, Mindy Weisberger During the Arctic winter, when the sun hides from October to March, the average temperature in the frozen north typically hovers around a bone-chilling minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Celsius). But this year, the Arctic is experiencing a highly unusual heat wave.
On Feb. 20, the temperature in Greenland not only climbed above freezing — 32 degrees F (0 degrees C) — it stayed there for over 24 hours, according to data from the Danish Meteorological Institute. And on Saturday (Feb. 24) the temperature on Greenland's northern tip reached 43 degrees F (6 degrees C), leading climate scientists to describe the phenomenon on Twitter as "crazy," "weird," "scary stuff" and "simply shocking."
Weather conditions that drive this bizarre temperature surge have visited the Arctic before, typically appearing about once in a decade, experts told Live Science. However, the last such spike in Arctic winter warmth took place in February 2016 — much more recently than a decade ago, according to the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). And climbing Arctic temperatures combined with rapid sea-ice loss are creating a new type of climate feedback loop that could accelerate Arctic warming, melting all Arctic sea ice decades earlier than scientists once thought.
Last week, it was warmer at Cape Morris Jessup in Greenland than it was in Paris.
In its larval form, the Hemeroplanes triptolemus is capable of expanding its anterior body segments to give it the appearance of a snake, complete with eye patches. This snake mimicry extends even to the point where it will harmlessly strike at potential predators.[2][3]
Comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdušáková will NOT destroy the earth this time around, so our long global nightmare will continue for (probably) another 5.25 years - until it comes back around.
Of course, with "President" Chaos in the White House, the odds improve greatly for the end to come a little sooner.
Sometimes, there really is somebody out to gitcha. Sometimes, it's just dumb luck they don't. And sometimes, you get lucky because the guys trying to get you are a buncha dumb fuckin' snakes.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could throw a few research bucks at an effort to figure out how we might get something like this to work for us? It's called Bio-Mimicry, bee-autch.
