If I were in charge, part deux.

Prisons would be something you wouldn't want to be in. They would be cruel and unusual punishment because, when you are convicted of a felony, you lose your constitutional rights permanently and don't deserve good treatment. For instance, if you went to prison your family would have to pay your way. They don't pay, you don't eat or sleep inside. And it wouldn't be a choice thing. Everything your family owned would be sold and all of their income would be garnisheed until you got out AND total restitution was paid to the victim(s) so tax dollars don't have to be wasted on scumballs. But, to be fair, your family could always get out of it by volunteering you for medical experiments.

No TV, mail, or medical care.....unless the medical students from the nearby veterinary college are willing to practice on you for extra credit. No dental care. No free surgery. 16 hours a day on a chain gang until you die. I predict a zero recidivism rate because on the second conviction criminals would be sent to prison in Turkey or Pakistan or Lebanon.

For the non-incarcerated idiots who smoke cigarettes, you should not be entitled to ANY medical or life insurance. Intentionally inhaling the products of combustion is as stupid as it gets right after blowing yourself up for God.

Here is an interesting site

http://www.co2science.org/

They suggest that the billions of tons of CO2 we (the humans) pump into the atmosphere is really beneficial because it gives plants more CO2 to convert to oxygen and everything is getting better all the time. Global warming is just a natural cycle which happens periodically, nothing to worry about. After all, there have been natural periods of global warming in the past, it's just business as usual.

Well, yes that is so and there have been ice ages as well. But prior to about 10,000 years ago, they were the result of the various earth orbital vagaries and rotation patterns and the warm and cool periods were simply the earth accommodating itself to those changes. The forests had not been cut down for timber and agriculture, the oceans were full of healthy fish the rain was clean and fresh, and the few million people who were hunting and gathering in small tribal groups generally died before they managed to cause too much damage.

Let's fast-forward to today. Depending upon where you live, your drinking water is either polluted or, if you are lucky, recycled sewage. The plant biomass which loves to produce oxygen from CO2 has been reduced by about 60%. The natural generation of CO2 has been supplemented by BILLIONS of tons a year that industrialization is spewing into the atmosphere. The fish are getting scarce, and the ones we CAN find are too toxic to eat safely. Wait....did I mention that the human population has increased from several million to over 6 BILLION and is growing daily despite the thousands of people who starve to death every week? You can look it up. http://www.worldometers.info/

Great....what are you doing about it? Did you join the Sierra Club to unload some guilt? Did you trade in that Suburban for a hybrid? Are you recycling your plastic and aluminum cans? Guess what? You aren't making a dent. You are doing NOTHING to help. You think you are, but what you are really doing is giving big corporations access to cheap, already refined materials so they can make more cheap cans and make more profit and providing your state a way to keep trash dumps empty longer while collecting a 5 or ten cent bounty on each container. Let me tell you why you are not helping. The mining company is in business to get as much ore out of the ground and processed in as short a time as possible. Quantity is how they stay competetive. The refinery is in the business of refining as much metal as they possibly can no matter who they buy it from. They need to sell more all the time to keep up with rising costs. It's that way all the way up and down the line. That's what free enterprise does. EVERY treatise you read on saving the environment says (and I paraphrase) "Everything, every choice, every move, every law, depends on the economy". And every one of them is wrong. The REAL problem is overpopulation, and it is not going to get better until about half the global population drops dead in one mass-extinction event. It will happen eventually. It has happened before. It could be H5N1 or it could be something much simpler.

As for your Prius hybrid, the trucks which get the cans to your local Wal-Mart are still using most of the fuel, along with jet aircraft. And chemical plants. And refineries. And power plants. God forbid you should miss American Idol in one room while three different shows are on in the rest of the house. And the sad part is that there is nothing you can do. The roller coaster is moving and you are merely along for the ride.

Now at first it seems as though these problems are simple, and a concerted effort could get us off the tracks before the train arrives. But nothing is simple. Try getting a concensus of where to go for dinner. And the problem is that almost no one understands the problems involved, certainly not lawmakers and world leaders. There is a lot to know about everything and it is all interrelated at some level. If you want to see how much YOU don't know, go read an article called 'The alternative genome' in the April 2005 Scientific American. Most people just automatically assume that someone (God or the leaders of the first-world countries) have everything under control. Nothing is further from the truth. The sky is not falling yet, but one can certainly see the foundation crumbling.

Today's book recommendations:

The Ancestor's Tale: A pilgrimage to the dawn of evolution, Richard Dawkins.

Guns, Germs and steel, the fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond.
Collapse, Jared Diamond.

The question of Carbon Dioxide

Although Martin Rees beat me to the comment by hours, I agree with him to a point. He believes there is no better than a 50% probability that homo sapiens will survive the 21st century. Since he is one of the premier scientists in the world, his opinion, unlike mine, cannot simply be laughed off.

It is my belief that we as a race do not care to believe that a warming trend exacerbated by the human race; religious wars; emerging biohazards; the end of cheap energy, a dwindling food supply and many people's irrational belief that some invisible God will protect them (although that idea is contrary to Scripture if one believes Scripture), have brought the planet to a condition of overpopulation which no one is willing to control sufficiently to stop the population explosion, the proximate cause of EVERY problem the world now faces. The point is, the trend is not reversible.

Since it is not politically correct to suggest that everyone does not have the absolute right to pump babies out at a rate which will destroy the earth within the next two hundred years, or at least exterminate 90% of the indigenous life on land and in the seas thus generating an immense die-off, I feel absolutely safe in predicting a mass extinction event before the end of the 22nd. century, WITHOUT the need to resort to nuclear exchanges.

While this is not a doomsday scenario, it could become one in an instant with the collision of an earth-crossing body (one much smaller than the K/T impactor would do); the eruption of a supervolcano; a surprise release of a few trillion tons of Carbon Dioxide marginally bound in ice on the ocean floors; or the main short-term problem: The actions of humans, evolved to live as hunter-gatherers, trapped in huge societal groups. An anger is building. People want to separate, but they cannot in many cases. This will not work itself out in behavioral modification patterns. People will start killing each other. As has been said by one smarter than I, no country is more than three meals from a revolution.

For years I have been considering the man-machine interface because I understand that we have to escape this physical form and get out into the galaxy in order to survive as an intelligence. I had always contented myself with the thought that science could overcome these problems, likely within the next few hundred to a thousand years, well before our sun cooked us. But now I realize that there have been several mass-extinction events in our geologic history and we are overdue. The question is, will enough people remain to pick up the pieces, re-learn the current knowledge and advance it fast enough to meet the new deadline of one billion years. It is actually closer (we guess) to 1,100 million years, but there are going to be at least three more mass extinctions during that period, assuming the earth is inhabited at all.

Let me give you some news. The world was not created by God less than 6,000 years ago. There are several reasons for this, but the most compelling is that God simply doesn't exist. Jesus probably did exist, but he was as looney as David Koresh and when he died, that was it. He is dead and is NOT coming back. I won't even argue it. If you don't believe me, learn Greek and study Flavius Josephus. But it is highly improbable that we will finish the 22nd. century without a mass extinction event or a nuclear holocaust between zealots who want to kill each other over who has the best invisible pal in the sky.