[lit-ideas] Re: book nausea
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2006 22:47:53 -0500
> [Original Message]
> From: Steve Chilson <stevechilson@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 11/28/2006 7:44:33 PM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: book nausea
>
> Andy -
>
> I feel compelled to add that any time someone starts ranting about what
> I *have* to pay attention to or see or read, it almost instantly dilutes
> their credibility because that level of insistence generally incubates
> fanaticism.
>
I spoze. Except that a little thing like global warming needs fanaticism
and gets only a yawn.
> Wasn't there an ice age before industrialisation? (I dunno, I wasn't
> there...)
>
Of course there was; there were many. If you saw Al Gore's movie, I
wouldn't have to explain it to you. Periods of warming and cooling
(accompanied by ice ages) kind of follow each other in a regular pattern.
Today's warming is unique in that it literally goes off the charts compared
to any of the earlier cycles going back 650,000 years. There's a direct
correlation between the amount of greenhouses and the temperature, and it
just keeps going up. See the movie. He does a much better job of
explaining it. It's only an hour and a half and will cost you $4.00.
> I don't have a lawn mower or a car and I don't shop at Walmart. I don't
> even shop at the cheap grocery store in the UK that I think is owned by
> Walmart.
>
> I don't worry about cows farting. Whether I eat them or not, they will
> go on farting (unless I eat all of them and then what would the Indians
> say?) and how much water it takes to turn them from poor little hindu
> icons into cheeseburgers, well, again, I'm not certain that all
> statistics can't be manipulated but hell, if I'm going to have to think
> about whether a box is empty or has a black swan in it, I've really hit
> the wall of disbelief, haven't I?
>
Except if no one in the U.S. ate cows or pigs or other animals, we wouldn't
have to get rid of 3.3 trillion pounds of manure every year, and we'd save
half the water supply of the country. That seems like a lot of pollution
to me, if not to you.
> I didn't vote for Al Gore.
I did. He's the road not taken. If Al Gore had won, we definitely would
not be in Iraq, the job in Afghanistan would have been completed, and the
surplus would still be there. We'd still have standing in the world and
he'd have a much greater platform to promote global warming initiatives.
Instead, we have what we have. I came away from the movie thinking that Al
Gore is a genuinely good person, one of the very few out there, as well as
an effective leader.
>In fact, I didn't vote at all.
I didn't vote in this election either.
>I didn't
> fart, I didn't vote, I didn't drive a car, I didn't pollute the rivers
> with industrial waste, I didn't own a weapons manufacturing plant, I
> didn't profit from the wars of anyone now that I think about it.
>
> I DID drink that glass of wine. I DID smoke that joint. I DID listen
> to that Ornette Coleman.
>
> I didn't invade Iraq. I didn't make the world grow smaller.
>
> I did smoke Drum. I did try to learn poetry. I did find my way in the
> dark.
>
> I didn't kill babies. I didn't even make them, let alone kill them.
> Nor did I kill or make anyone else's babies. I didn't build corporate
> society, I didn't invent religion, I didn't tell people to kill other
> people in the name of religions.
>
You're right, one person can't do much, and 6 billion don't want to.
> I did spend years of my life waiting for buses and trains. And that's
> about it, Andy. Al Gore's film, being the Al Gore that he is, is just
> that, a film.
>
No, it's not just a film. It's telling the dummkopfs out there what's
going on. He named it correctly, an inconvenient truth. Nobody wants to
be bothered with it until it's too late. People are unbelievable. Stupid
to the bitter end.
> Global warming? Fuck, if I was worried about that, I'd stop global
> dying first.
>
>
No, you'd encourage global dying. Humans are the cause. He makes a good
point that from year one to 1950 there were 2 billion people in the world.
Today there are 6 billion. In another basically few years there will be 9
billion. In one lifetime (one lifetime) we will have added 7 billion
people to the surface of the earth with concomitant industrialization,
virtually none of whom care about the earth they're ransacking. Kurt
Vonnegut said the earth will be happy to shake the humans off its back.
But, of course, you, along with most people, don't believe GW is happening
so that's that.
For Eric, forwards (jokes) that I send don't necessarily reflect my
opinions. I personally happen to know an adult who lost an eye as a child
in one of those you'll-put-your-eye-out games. He's been blind in one eye
since he was a child. Princess Di would be alive if she was wearing a
seatbelt. People need to have helmets and other things legislated or they
won't do it, and then they use up my tax dollars having the government take
care of them.
I also think the most dangerous people and places in the world for children
are parents and the family. If I had my druthers I'd license everybody
before they had children. The way it is now, plunk out a human and
permanently mess up his life and it's your God-given right to do so. And
we do need to be afraid of offending minority and other groups. It takes
nothing for humans to go off the edge into incivility and much worse.
Unleash that genie and he's not coming back, not easily anyway.
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