Enough
It’s been a while since I’ve ragged on Our Fearless Leader, mainly because the rest of you finally woke up and smelled the napalm. I swear, until the day I die I’ll never understand how anybody with two functioning brain cells couldn’t tell that Bush was an evil, greedy, lying bastard from the first time he opened his smirking, illiterate mouth. Are people really so incredibly stupid and blind that they ever thought Bush was one of the good guys?? From day one his brutal nature couldn’t have been more plain than if he’d been making campaign speeches while eating a live puppy.
Then you elected the warmongering Constitution-destroying asshole for a second term. He’s actually got access to The Button, and he can’t even pronounce the word “nuclear” correctly, for God’s sake. But no, it took the destruction of New Orleans with the horrifying spectacle of doctors having to decide whether to euthanize their patients or leave them to die of thirst while The President of the United States of America cheerfully played guitar at a fundraiser and the Secretary of State went shoe shopping*, and the sacrifice of five thousand of our sons and daughters in a war he lied us into, and the death of about a hundred thousand innocent Iraqi men, women and children for people to start thinking that maybe this AWOL fratboy isn’t the messiah we’d been looking for.
Then there’s the little nastiness about torturing people, and warrentless wiretaps, and war profiteering by the company that still employs the Vice President, and on and on and on and on ad infinitum. Honestly, at this point I’m beginning to think that H.G. Wells was being overly optimistic about the future of mankind in The Time Machine.
Well guess what, kiddies? Our Morlock-In-Chief has been doing something far, far worse since the Supreme Court mooted the 2000 election and plopped him into the Oval Office. This so-called “leader” has deliberately suppressed any scientific evidence that global warming — excuse me; the accepted term is now “climate change” — is a real and imminent danger to the survival of humanity. I’m not talking about a couple of million people dead here; I’m talking about the complete extinction of the human race. These scientific findings inconvenience his buddies in the oil industry who are largely responsible for the mess, and so la-la-la-la I-can’t-HEAR-you they don’t exist. In 2001 most of the computer models predicted that we had about ten years until we reached the “tipping point,” when we basically are fucked beyond all redemption. That was almost eight years ago.
Alas, even that bleak scenario was a tad too rosy. It turns out that a little-known (to the public, at least) phenomena called “global dimming” has reversed itself. Believe it or not, the amount of light reaching the surface of the earth had been decreasing since the 1950s, due to particulate matter in the atmosphere. And not by an insignificant amount, either: some estimates put it at a full ten percent. I can attest to that; I was born in 1957, and sunlight seemed brighter in my boyhood than now. I suspect most people my age remember light looking different back then.
The reason dimming has reversed is that we’ve stopped spewing so much soot and smoke into the air; we had to, since airborne particulates can, and have, brought on ice ages. We know of two for sure: 250,000 years ago a super-volcano in Indonesia erupted with a force 20 times that of the largest thermonuclear explosion ever detonated. All evidence indicates it created an ecological catastrophe that whittled humanity down to between ten to a hundred thousand individuals. This genetic bottleneck is why every single human on earth is descended from one woman who lived in Africa. More recently, the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the same region caused the “Year With No Summer” of 1816, with snowstorms in June throughout Canada and New England, and river ice in Pennsylvania as late as August.
Unfortunately, this dimming, which was unsuspected until about 1988, has been masking the worst effects of rising greenhouse gasses such as methane and carbon dioxide. (As an aside to an already far-too-long post, please stop calling the offending substance “carbon.” We’re carbon. All life on this planet is carbon-based. It’s carbon dioxide that’s the problem.) As a result, all of the computer models were way, way off. Later this summer we will probably see an ice-free Arctic passage across North America for the first time in human history, and vast ice shelves are melting away in Antarctica. The “tipping point” is, unfortunately, probably a year or so in our past. Translation: we are in all probability royally screwed, and most of the proposed solutions are pretty darn scary, such as releasing a vast cloud of aluminum particles orbiting between us and the sun. Nothing could possibly go wrong with something like that, right?
It’s a simple fact that we are in the early stages of a global catastrophe, with rising water levels, weather patterns changing unpredictably, more frequent and more violent storms as the oceans heat up, mass extinctions of wildlife, famine, etc… Your basic Old-Testament clusterfuck. And we are facing this crisis simply because George W. Bush chose to silence his own scientists and make a few quick bucks instead.
So I find it very irksome indeed when this monster that may have doomed our species does something like this at the G8 Summit in Japan last week:
The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”
He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.
Impeach this human stain now. Impeach him, try him according to the laws he so contemptuously disregards, and throw his worthless murderous ass in prison for the rest of his stinking days. Meanwhile, the rest of us will have to suffer for his crimes of commission and omission. I hope we make it.
And you gullible fools that voted for him: your hands are as bloody as his.
* To the woman who walked up to Rice in that Mahattan shoe store while people were needlessly dying in Louisiana and said “How DARE you?” — God bless you. You served your nation well, and I am in awe of your courage. I hope history remembers you along with the man that stood in front of the tanks in Tienanmen Square as an ordinary person that stood up for simple human decency and said enough is enough.
It was like an old Candid Camera sketch where they unscrewed the lids on all the salt shakers. Garlic powder completely covered my hamburger patties. I stared at the container. All previous garlic powder from this manufacturer (a famous spices-and-herbs brand that isn’t Lawry’s) had screw tops with a shaker underneath. THIS one had a screw top cleverly hidden beneath a barely-visible flip top. There was no shaker underneath the screw top.