Whose job is it to protect you?

I repeat this a lot, but a lot of people think the police or someone else is going to protect them from ne'er-do-wells, if they think of it at all. Usually it's "It won't happen to ME." I watched a Brinks commercial tonight. The dumbass woman is watching TV with her kids and sees an ominous shadow on the floor. We aren't told how the shadow could have got on the floor. It can't have been the troglodyte outside the window unless light curves and bends. Instead of screaming and freezing, like everyone in the world would actually do, she hustles the kids off to an upstairs bedroom while the guy outside runs up and breaks a window with a tire iron...for no reason whatsoever...and then runs away. Burglars don't break windows AFTER they have been seen and they don't break windows too small to use as an entry point, but this guy did. The alarm goes off. The mother barely gets upstairs when Brinks calls. That is interesting because the alarm autodialer to Brinks ain't finished dialing yet. "Is anything wrong?" says the dumbass Brinks guy. Hell no, pal...my window break sensor went off because of swamp gas "Yes" says the woman calmly... "someone just tried to break in." "Ma'am, I'm sending help right now." "The woman, visibly relieved, says "Thank you". But in the 20 minutes it takes for the police to get there, she and her kids could be meat on the table. See, if someone comes to your house and breaks in while the lights and TV are on, they already know who is in the house, they are obviously not afraid and intend to do something you won't like.

Apparently the alarm scared off the burglar who was a moron anyway for not noticing the "Brinks" signs all over the house and failing to cut the phone line and the wire to the outside audible alarm. But eventually the police get there and explain to the woman "This could have been a lot worse". "Thank you" she replies..a totally inappropriate thing to say in the circumstance. Yes, it could. Instead of an idiot, it might have been someone with enough sense to kick down the door, grab a kid, and tell the mom to tell the Brinks guy it was a mistake and make her turn off the alarm. Or break in before she armed the alarm which people do, if at all, when they go to bed. Or picked the house next door which doesn't have an alarm. Or go "Meow, Meow' in the bushes until the kids get mom to go see about the cat.

Do you have security cameras all over? That's good. It will help the police figure out who kidnapped and murdered your daughter. Do you have a dog? Even better. Dogs are wonderful. Failing a firearm and proficiency with it, a good dog about 120 pounds is the next best thing. The intruder won't have heard the dog barking when he cased the joint and won't have brought a pork chop laced with rat poison to feed it before he comes for you.

Look, by the time you dial 911 the guy has already got into your house and unless you can defend yourself you have no chance. There is a book out called "Dial 911 and die". There are 5 MILLION violent crimes in the US every year. There would be about twice that many but for armed citizens. 911 is nothing more than government sponsored dial-a-prayer.

Many crimes occur because people simply refuse to defend themselves. They don't believe it can happen to them. They think the police are less than 30 seconds away at all times. It simply isn't true. Where I live, the police don't go to at least a non-trivial percentage of their calls. They are busy and sometimes they just don't get around to it.

You better forget the idea of living in a society in which the government can protect you. The police are NEVER called until AFTER you are victimized or dead. If you want to protect your family, YOU need to accept the primary responsibility. You can get a permit to carry a concealed weapon in most states (with some notable exceptions). You can hire a gunslinger (like me) who is licensed to carry a concealed weapon in all fifty states. You can get a Taser in many states. You can get pepper spray. You can always get Home and Garden Raid which sprays up to 25 feet and expend a can in an attacker's face. It will probably stop him or her unless they are drugged up.

The thing I usually hear is "Oh, I couldn't hurt anyone". OK. Look through a forensic textbook (Brent Turvey has some good ones out) and see what will happen to you if one of these bad people gets hold of you. After that it's "A GUN??? Suppose a child found it?" Suppose you don't leave it around for a child to find. Suppose you teach your sissy x-box playing brats not to play with guns. If they shoot themselves anyway they are doing the genepool a favor.

I am not advocating violence or crime, but GUNS are merely expensive rocks. The person's MIND is the weapon, not the method. Don't blame guns for killing people. Blame cars. Guns kill people like pencils cause misspelled words.

The Presidents

This is the simple version. Not everyone agrees with it, but I have never, since 1960, failed to correctly predict the results of a Presidential election and this is how I decided. I am going to skip right to Jimmy Carter, who is almost as stupid as Dubya (he pulled the rug out from under the Shah of Iran and thus enabled the Ayatollahs to take power and our embassy) and is now showing himself to be an anti-semitic idiot. I don't care whether he is or not, I'm just saying. He lost a second term because he wouldn't stand up to Iran while they held our hostages for 444 days and he gave the Panama canal away. To Manuel Noriega.

Bush 41 didn't get reelected for the simple reason that he refused to get rid of his VP, fondly remembered as the Man Who Couldn't Spell Potato.

Al Gore didn't get elected behind Bill Clinton because the country was punishing the Democrats for lying about Monica. No one cares that she was sucking his John-Thomas. Everyone cared that he lied under oath about it. If it had not been for that, the idiot Bush 43 would not be president.

If it's Hillary vs Obama, Obama will win. I'd vote for McCain, but he's a Republican and Bush has ruined the Republican party for years. So if it's Hillary vs McCain, Hillary.

Mission accomplished in Iraq !!!!

SUCCESS IN IRAQ!!!
It's time we leave Iraq. Our mission is accomplished.

We have been completely successful at training and equipping the Iraqi police and army well enough that they are able to kill several hundred insurgents dressed as civilians a day and will soon be killing thousands more.

The middle east is now completely destroyed and our ability to influence either Iran or anyone else is gone. Iran now realizes that we neither have the will nor the power to prevent them from carving up Iraq and starting a nuclear war to destroy Israel.

Let's take our victory and move on to North Korea. We haven't actually lost that war yet. There is still time to get another wing on the new Presidential Library. I propose it be built near Waco at the old Branch Davidian site.

In other news, the war on drugs has been almost as successful as prohibition, the Constitution is only a piece of paper, and Dubya is officially the worst two-term president in history.

Dear President Bush

You didn't lose the House and Senate because there is not enough progress being made in Iraq. You lost because YOU lied to us about needing to invade Iraq. There were no WMDs and you knew it but you wanted to prove how much better a leader you are than your father. You aren't. You are just a common liar.

You have lied to us, every day with everything you said and when we started to complain, you began revoking our freedoms under the Constitution which you swore, during your oath of office, to uphold. You lied during your VERY FIRST ACT AS PRESIDENT, by taking that oath.

Now we have given the Democrats a mandate to reverse your power grab and your attempt to revoke the Constitution and your eavesdropping on us all and your permission for Americans to torture prisoners and the disappearance of Habeas Corpus and those 800 little notes you appended to laws passed by Congress with which you give yourself permission to simply ignore the law if you don't like it.

You are not our king, pal. You are our employee. It isn't treason to disagree with you. Your war is wrong and illegal and has destabilized the entire middle east and America has no respect anymore from any country in the world because of you.

Who do you think you are to ruin our legacy, to ruin my chances of getting Social Security, to send our children to Iraq over and over again until they are killed to spend half a TRILLION dollars funding Halliburton when Americans have no medical insurance?

You ARE the emperor with no clothes. I love America and the Office of President but, as the vote proved, most of us hate YOU and your ignorant, muddled, slurred attempt to be relevant.

The Domesday book, Chapter VIII

My buddy from San Francisco:

You clearly need cheering up; besides large volcanoes smothering the planet in toxic gases (we're over due for those you know) the Earth's magnetic field is in the process of a polar shift and about to collapse bathing the planet in deadly solar radiation. Then there is China running out of water, unlike oil they can't steal if from anyone else (California long ago showed the limits of that). Resulting stress from a lack of food, pollution and radiation damage will make them wide open for a nice pandemic that will spread its deadly tendrils around the world.

You see, the great wheel of life will turn crushing countless millions to a bloody pulp in the process and things with turn out all happy.

Actually, I am looking forward to watching nature push back at our attempts to ruin the earth.

Super volcanoes: Yep, we ARE overdue and there are several possibilities, one under Yellowstone. That sulphurous boiling water is bubbling up for a reason, but we can't predict those things and we aren't even sure that another one will occur without some outside influence like an earth impactor. It's not something we created.

I am very interested in the perambulations of the magnetosphere but not particularly worried by it. That reversal occurs on a regular basis and is happening now. Sometimes it happens in a matter of days or weeks, sometimes it takes thousands of years. Our magnetosphere is weakening and becoming irregular and the polarity WILL flip, but no one knows when or why, or the result, or the actual dangers, but I'm thinking the worse that will happen is we take some hits from solar radiation that change our weather patterns. And cooks our satellites, or some of them. And I'll probably get a lot more basal cell carcinoma than I do now.

But neither of those things are due to overpopulation and all of my 'sky is falling' scenarios are a direct result of overpopulation and our inability, as a race, to deal with it politically. Someone has to go, but no one wants to be that someone. And no one really has the moral authority to decide who goes and who stays, so it boils down to who has the nastiest and most effective WMDs and is willing to use them to destroy much of the world. And THAT is controlled by who has the advanced technology and manufacturing capability to generate food and weapons at the same time and THAT is a function of who controls the energy resources. But the very dynamic of switching back to a coal-fired energy base to support all the people will ruin the planet. We have only 300 million people in the US out of 6 BILLION in the world, but we use 25% of the earth's energy resources and are the largest polluter and we simply are not going to stop 'til we drop.

I gotta tell you that the Muslims are more than willing to die if they can take us and the Jews out with them (although the logic behind that astounds me) but I doubt that living in a mosque in the desert and knowing of only one book in the world, the Quran, is conducive to creating agile politicians or freedom of thought. But the reality is that these sand turbans are going to have nukes and delivery systems in the VERY near future.

Pakistan, one of the most backward countries in the world has an arsenal already. They passed it on to Iran and Iran has the weapons NOW, but not enough of them to be able to offer us a shit sandwich and make us eat it. But they will, and they are not afraid to start lighting those things off. Here's why: Our military is seriously degraded. After Iraq we may not be able to get volunteers anymore. I certainly wouldn't volunteer for the military knowing I would be sent to a shit war over and over until I got killed. At least in Nam we knew we'd get out if we made it for 13 months.

And we DO have nuclear aircraft carriers and subs, but we have only a limited number of delivery vehicles. Once we shoot off the MIRVs in the boomers and the cruise missiles, we are done. The ships can sail, but if there is no jet fuel the aircraft stay home.

We must win a nuclear war in the first round and, to preserve the economy of the entire WORLD, we can't allow nuclear strikes on major US or allied cities. If that happened, it would prove to the world that we talk the talk but can't walk the walk. And we would no longer be a superpower, we'd be down in the dirt with everyone else. The problem is that nuclear war is unwinnable because everyone ends up dead. The USSR understood that. Iran doesn't care. We are better off loosing a biological but.......errr....we don't make them anymore. SHHHHHH!

Power, you see, is as much a matter of perception as ability. We didn't win in Korea. We lost in Viet Nam. We broke almost even in Panama and Granada, but we were run out of Lebanon and Somalia and our efforts in Bosnia....well, no one even knows WHY we were in Bosnia. Now we have destabilized the entire middle east and made ourselves the asshole of the world in the process. And the President's psychotic agenda pushed him to grab most of our constitutional right to privacy and protection from illegal search and torture and imprisonment forever without a hearing. We have become EXACTLY what Iraq was under Saddam and only today have the voters arisen in revolt and proclaimed Bush to be a failure and maybe the worst president ever. History will not look upon him kindly.

But no matter what, Washington rolls on wheels greased by special interests and they don't give a shit if everyone dies as long as they get more than their share. And there is big money floating around in Congress. 40 MILLION dollars was spent on just ONE Senate race. Missouri, I believe, where Claire McCaskell won with the help of Michael J. Fox and Rush Limbaugh who should have stayed home with John Kerry.

This has turned into an actual rant and I am off my subject, so I am going to stop. But as long as politicians and the religious fundies worry about same-sex marriage as though it is going to end the world and then sneak off to their own homosexual encounters, there isn't much hope.

The Domesday Book, Chapter VII

A Colorado reader comments:
I think the best thing to do at this point is to stop waiting for our governments to do something and instead, take personal responsibility for the problem. And this approach will work regardless of which crooks are running our government by growing the businesses that will create the change.

You are missing the point. And for the same reason everyone else misses it.

See, it doesn't matter whether everyone in America has hybrid cars. The energy it took to produce them comes from fossil fuel. The energy it takes to produce a photovoltaic array or a windmill farm far exceeds the possible energy return from them. The amount of fuel it takes to grow food and bring it to the marketplace is staggering and the electrical grid of the WORLD is powered by fossil fuels for the most part. The energy required to convert raw uranium to a fuel isotope and store it after it is used is more than the potential power produced by the plant over it's lifetime. That's why we aren't building any more...and you didn't address the reason we are running out of resources: overpopulation.

We have already used up most of the earth's natural resources. They are not renewable. When the oil is gone and the coal is gone and the forests have been burned for heat, we are really and truly ****ed. And that is not some fantasy humans will need to address in a thousand years. We will all be dead in a thousand years. GOD will not appear at the last minute and save us. He has never appeared at the last minute and saved ANYONE! He did show up once to to Show Moses His hindquarters. Moses was mooned by God. Holy Moses!

The only thing that will slow our complete extinction that is a mass extinction event or a huge nuclear war or an uncontrolled pandemic, and all of those are looming big. Depending upon exactly how it plays out, there will either be a few mammals left or none at all. If there are a few left they will immediately go about the business of killing or enslaving the rest.

But even then, the ice is already melting, faster and faster each day. Very soon, the weather will either go completely out of control and revert back to the premordial soup era with constant acid rain and rapidly increasing CO2 levels, or it will simply stop. The jetstream will stop, the Atlantic conveyor will stop and the seas will become stagnant ponds of red algae. Clouds will no longer form (I need an entire chapter to explain THAT) and there won't be any more rain. The Ozone layer will dissolve.

There is nothing you can do as an individual or a town or a country to stop it. Believe me, China is not going to stop burning coal and the US is going to start burning it again big time when the Mideast goes up in flames because of that ****ing idiot George Bush. My state has one geothermal plant which is clean....until we have an earthquake and it vents a million tons of SO2 into the atmosphere. As it is, our volcano tosses out a million pounds a month anyway, but it usually blows north over Maui and Oahu. And we are one of the three PRIME areas in North America to have a windmill farm. We actually have several of them, put in years ago at the cost of untold millions of dollars. But after the oil crisis of the 70s went away, no one wanted to fund their maintenance anymore, so they sat there and rusted. Now that we need them they are merely eyesores.

Our local power generation grid is coal powered and diesel powered. A collier docks here every month or so and offloads a whole shipload of coal. And a barge comes in with diesel and gasoline. And we have no industry here except growing macadamia nuts and orchids. Industrial states and countries cannot get enough power and will use force when it starts to run out, JUST AS WE ARE DOING IN IRAQ. But because Bush lied about it instead of simply saying "OK, we now own this oil", we have been ****ing around and will end up without it.

I think I need to write a book. I am not as good at connecting the dots as Richard Burke (Connections), but I have thought a lot of this through and every time I find another connection, it points to a closed entropic system which is nearing chaos. And when we start hemorrhaging, stop-gap political band-aids won't even begin to help.

The Domesday Book, Chapter VI

From our Australian correspondent:
"Umm....any chance of a rant that isn't about us all being doomed?"

Not much. But you can do what everyone else is doing. Pretend there is no problem. Pretend there is plenty of food to go around and pretend that the commercial I have been seeing on TV.....a little girl smiling and saying that there is 250 years of coal left so why worry....isn't propaganda.

Oh sure, there is plenty of coal left. High sulphur coal. When it burns and the Sulpfur Dioxide (SO3) mixes with water vapor (H2O), like it does around the volcano I live on, it turns to something else. What happens when SO3 dissolves in H2O? Anyone?

"You get acid. Acid rain. Another thing they're trying to deny the existence of."

Very good! The compound which is formed is Sulphurous acid, H2SO3. The reaction goes like this: SO2+H2O==>H2SO3 which is a weak, unstable dibasic acid. Now the point becomes why are we concerned with that? So what? So this: Without going into the chemistry, the bottom line is that Sulphurous acid solution is slowly oxidised by atmospheric oxygen to Sulphuric acid. So Carbon Dioxide and Sulphuric acid. Sound familiar? Think Venus.

Venus is THE runaway greenhouse effect poster child. The temperature and pressure of the atmosphere decrease with height, so water vapor rises in the atmosphere and encounters conditions that should cause it to condense back into liquid water and fall back to the surface. Rain.

On Earth the ozone layer prevents ultraviolet light from destroying water in our atmosphere. Our water is recycled through the atmosphere and most of it returns to earth. On Venus, there is no LONGER an ozone layer, and the atmosphere isn't opaque to ultraviolet light. This allows ultraviolet light to destroy water because, as water rises in Venus' atmosphere, UV light dissociates it into two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The hydrogen is much lighter than the water molecule was so it easily escapes Venus' atmosphere. The water will usually quickly recombine with a carbon or carbon monoxide molecule to form carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide. Venus' atmosphere is:

* CO2: 96.5%
* N2: 3.5%
* SO2: 0.015%

Heavy water, which is composed of one oxygen, one hydrogen, and one deuterium (a proton and one neutron), cannot reach the requisite height as easily. If it does, it can still be dissociated just like normal water, but this happens at a much slower rate. Thus, a measurement of how much deuterium compared with how much hydrogen today shows that Venus has much more deuterium in its atmosphere for each hydrogen atom than Earth does. This is the strongest evidence that Venus has lost a massive amount of water in its history.

Like we will. But probably not for quite a while.

I'm not a pessimist nor can I predict the future. I simply see what is going on and try to extrapolate it a few years.

"I know everything you've been saying in these rants is unfortunately true."

I believe it is, but there are many people who disagree.

"Is there absolutely no way to delay the inevitable though? None at all? Nothing anyone can do?"

Not in my opinion. Humans shit in their own nests because there have always been plenty of new nesting sites, and there still are. There is plenty of pristine land left, but 50 SQUARE MILES if it is turning into desert every day. In addition, our memories are short. Great grandpa is dead so we cannot directly compare his experiences with our own. So we cannot see ourselves sinking into oblivion.

But there isn't plenty of energy left and there isn't any way to feed more people than we have on a long-term basis without burning a lot of energy to produce artificial crops and artificial herds of animals to eat. We have almost completely depleted the oceans of fish since 1950 and I must make the point one more time that ALL life on earth that relates to us is controlled by a very tiny band of sea and air. I estimate it at fifteen meters thick, extending about 8 meters above and below sea level. If the balance of life is disrupted anywhere within that zone, biotic life will simply cease to exist.

In the natural scheme of things every organism competes with every other organism for food, living space and reproduction rights. Evolution allows random mutations to push up out of the status quo and continue pushing until they run out of food or living space. That's why dinosaurs got so big and that's why they ruled for millions of years. Until they ran out of food...or air. Then they all died. (this is not a treatise on the causality of major extinctions, so we will not postulate on the reasons they occurred....suffice it to say they did and left a fossil record.)

Humans started out with an opposable thumb. We don't have the best eyesight in the animal kingdom by far. Birds, the descendants of warm-blooded dinosaurs do. But then we did something no other terrestrial animal did. We started growing bigger brains faster than bigger bodies. It was exactly what no one could have predicted because it was an entirely new evolutionary strategy and it was too successful. It ruined the balance of nature. We broke out of millions of years of slow change punctuated by sudden global disasters into an organism that could, for the first time, create our own global disaster.

And we are not going to stop and think what we are doing until we have done it. We can't. The very recipe for our evolutionary success, which is 'breed 'till you bleed' precludes us from changing the reason we were successful in the first place. We got here by killing everything that got in our way and it is our destiny to meet that same doom. We have such a strong genetic imperative to breed that some people even try to breed with members of their own sex. I am absolutely NOT anti-gay. I am merely pointing out that the genetic imperative to breed is still there no matter what your orientation and there is nothing wrong with it.

But advocating an "Abstinence until you are twenty-one" policy is not only extremely stupid, it creates more serious psychological problems than just handing out a couple of condoms to your sons and daughters before they go on a date.

Just like the obviously ridiculous policy of Catholic priests not being allowed to have sexual relations with women after GOD specifically invented sex between a man and a woman. That's not right. It's not even wrong. It just promotes a priesthood full of kiddy-diddlers. Even if you are one of the superstitious fools who believes in a huge invisible pal in the clouds you know that isn't right. Hey dummies, GOD's ONLY job is to kill everything which ever lived. Your soul is no good to Him while you are still using it.

The Domesday Book, Chapter V

From our New Zealand correspondent:
"Cheerful little sod aren't ya!"

Yes.

"Our beloved (NZ) government has decided to "do something" about Global Warming...only nobody seems quite sure what, but no doubt it'll be something which: 1) The glorious opposition can attack & claim it's useless & 2) The entire country will find painful in some way,so we can bitch & moan & whinge constantly."

Well, you sure have that part down pat. The problem is that America won't let you do anything meaningful. We gotta have our air conditioners and our Hummers and our factories making things we don't need and we'll get them as long as we have the cash to pay for oil or the power to take it by force.

The planet is already crashing and even today there is no way to stop it. But we won't stop it. We will fight over the remaining resources until we go extinct.

People think it will be a slow process and we will be able to fix it with enough money or that Jesus will come back at the last second and save everyone.

I have no idea what the people on Easter Island thought as they were cutting down their last tree, but it is quite likely that I'll be here to see the modern equivalent.

The Domesday Book, Chapter IV

It is only a matter of time. No new weapon in history has ever been invented that was not eventually used by all sides in a conflagration, each one greater and more horrible than the last, with the possible exception of biological agents. We have 'em and will use them to clean up anything the nukes miss, but the problem with biologicals is that once they are loose in the wild they immediately begin to mutate in unpredictable ways. You can't stop them and you can't make them selective.

People in many countries have come to believe that they live in civilized societies and will be protected by the government or the police or God, so they pass anti-gun legislation and become victims waiting for someone to rape, rob and murder them. CSI is supposed to be a good show (I have never watched it), but the police.....and the CSI people don't arrive until someone finds the raped and mutilated bodies of the victims.

I would have been a victim several times over if I had not been given a rifle at a very young age and trained in it's use and the responsibility that goes with owning a gun at a very early age. But I was, and so I was ready to defend my home at age 6, which I did successfully. I believe that I live in a civilized nation, but I have been in several gunfights which I did not ask for or seek out, but they happened. I learned not to delegate my personal defense. I assume the responsibility for it. Marshall is another person who understands what I am saying. He has been there and he knows firsthand.

And MILLIONS.....that is MILLIONS of Americans a year prevent themselves from being victims of violent crimes by simply rejecting the mindset of victimology.

President Teddy Roosevelt, realized this and had schools teach kids to use firearms. Then everyone became lieberals and decided that Big Brother would protect them from all comers, and that boys needed to learn ballroom dancing. But it isn't true. If you want to be terrorized, forget the stupid Amber Alert crap you saw on the news. Lightning will strike more people than terrorists ever will.

Wait until you wake up in the middle of the night and realize someone is in your room. But when that person is in your room and you know you can't get to a phone and you know your kids are in the next room, you suddenly understand that you are no longer in control.....of your life, of your family's lives, of your body, of anything. Friends, THAT is terror. And the choices you could have made but didn't, and chose to be a victim instead, now guarantee that something really bad is about to happen. You can only hope that he strangles you BEFORE he mutilates your body. And regardless of what you see on TV, unless your attacker is a close relative, business associate or household member, if he doesn't leave a lot of forensic evidence, he (or she) may never get caught. Apart from druggies, there are probably sixty serial killers operating in the US right now. All they want to do is kill YOU. They have no mercy, and they haven't been caught. Most of them operate for years and most of them never get caught.

I am a strong advocate of people owning, and being proficient with firearms. "OMG!" you say! " I would never allow a firearm in my house because of my children". I know parents who won't let their kids learn to swim because they might drown. All you are doing is preventing these kids from being prepared to function in the real world. Don't take them camping, either. Don't let them play sports. God forbid they should fall down or get dirty.

Teach them that JESUS is in charge and won't let anything bad happen to them. Don't discipline them. Don't disrespect them by exercising any control at all. Then when they end up in jail for shooting all their classmates because they think it's a computer game or because they have been raised to be irresponsible sociopaths, blame society.

The Domesday Book, Chapter III

Carbon Dioxide storage is here. Compressing the gas into a supercritical fluid and pumping it underground is the way big oil is working to keep the greenhouse gases at a manageable level. They say there is enough room underground to store decades worth of CO2. Billions of tons. Maybe, if the plan goes big-time, trillions of tons.

But 'underground' doesn't mean the same thing as burying Aunt Mildred. She probably won't come back to haunt us during an earthquake. The first time we have even a small earth impactor, or a serious enough earthquake all of the undissolved gas is going to be ejected to the surface. Here's the problem. We can't breathe it. So when it DOES come out, it will overwhelm (1) every oxygen breathing organism it covers; (2) industry's ability to hide it again, and (3) will cause a sudden and immediate spike in the atmospheric temperature.

Some of it is going to leech in to the water table and turn the water acidic and some is going to push things like uranium and arsenic to the surface, but that's a whole other story.

Burying all that CO2 is like planting a huge asphyxiation bomb and hoping it doesn't go off.

The Domesday Book, Chapter II

The global population hit one billion about 1800. Two hundred years later there are 6 billion people on earth click on this and scroll down.

I wish they had a tabulation about how fast the ice is melting, but I don't see it. I don't think there is good quantification yet.

The earth can support about 3.5 billion people. We can't kill off all the animals or eat all the food or deplete all the oceans at that number, but we have already burned most of the oil. More people than that deplete the natural resources beyond their ability to replenish. We have already tipped the ecosystem past the point of no return, so there is going to be an extinction event pretty soon. I am talking mass die-off here, not merely a pandemic or a nuclear war, although those are probably in the cards too.

The food is almost gone and the oil is almost gone. The DAY Iran gets a serious nuclear capability they are going to nuke Israel and Israel is going to nuke all of the oil regions in the middle east. Everyone knows it. And they can't help it. They have been fighting each other since the dawn of civilization and they will never stop.

The Muslims are willing to live in the 7th century again, without cars, without oil, without electricity, without medical care, because many of them do anyway, and they will take the loss to get rid of the Great Satan. But because they are such ignorant assholes they don't realize that when the earth goes they will go with it.

The Great Satan, in the meantime, is going to run out of food and oil at the same time. EXACTLY the same time. And so will everyone else. The economy of the entire world will crash on that day. And it won't be 2040 when there are 9 BILLION people, it will be between 2010 and 2020.

Will the human race survive? I used to think "Sure. Life is very difficult to extinguish. But there won't be many and they won't have a very good chance of starting over". Now I am reconsidering. A disaster involving 6+ billion people will overwhelm every government on the first day. The second day there will be no more government or armies because everyone will be trying to get to their families. They won't make it. That same day people will start killing each other for food or revenge or for medicine or just because that's what people do when they don't know what else to do.

By the end of that week if you are anywhere NEAR a population center you will be dead or starving. Stephen King described the landscape in The Stand, which was the only King book I could ever read. It rang optimistically true except he allowed a few people to live. He didn't know about global warming back then.

I can hear you saying "Wait a minute, Pal! A global warming die-off can't just happen is a week or a month. We would notice and stop it." I beg to differ. There are BILLIONS of tons of CO2 ice just sitting in the oceans like huge rocks. The oceans have been absorbing it for thousands of years. As a result, we still have enough O2 to breathe and the earth hasn't overheated. But if the oceans warm up just a bit and that stuff bubbles back into the atmosphere....or if the Atlantic conveyor stops and the sulphur-loving organisms near the bottom move toward the surface, we are ****ed, right then. Not in 20 years, I mean within weeks.

Plants are going to help kill us too. Everyone knows that plants convert CO2 to O2 through photosynthesis, but we have just discovered that when plants are stressed they can produce methane as well. Like cows. Methane is a good, clean fuel but it is also a greenhouse gas which lingers in the atmosphere for about 100 years and warms the earth 23 times as much as CO2. Burning 20 gallons of gas equals a good cow fart.

We are past the tipping point before which we could prevent this. We are very near the critical point at which this situation will begin to feed on itself. We don't notice it because our top is spinning just like it always has so we feel no sense of impending danger. When it stops, and I use a metaphor, it will wobble once or twice like a kid's top and almost instantly crash, just as tops do. When it does, humans, which are not able to control the weather, or each other, or do anything but kill off every other life-form that gets in the way of a parking lot, are not going to know what hit them. Do you know that 99% of every species and plant which has ever existed on earth is extinct? That's just natural. It has happened because we have had 5 MAJOR and several other less major extinction events we can document. Here is the Wiki.

So science tells us that even without an earth impactor, another major extinction event will happen within 10 million years regardless, but that the activities of humans, a previously non-existent factor, may move the event up to ........oh, maybe....tomorrow.

But every cloud has a silver lining. No scientist has ever witnessed the world dying off before, so there is a lot we can learn! As long as we can write pretty fast. Sadly, no one will ever read it.

And there is religion. If everyone is dead, we will have succeeded in our goal of wiping out organized religion. If I am one of the temporary survivors though, you can be damn sure I am going to try to control anyone I meet by invoking religion. If that doesn't work and they won't accept me as King, I'll just kill them.

The Domesday Book, Chapter I

I have had this nagging idea for some time now and I just realized what it is. I have never been one of those nutty vegetarians (no pun in ten did), but for the past few years the meat in the stores hasn't looked quite right to me and I haven't been able to figure out why.

I used to go into the meat section and the steaks looked appetizing. I mean, really GOOD! Now they are all exactly the same color and it isn't the color beef used to be. Not only that but in the past you could find the same cuts of beef in various sizes. Now they are all almost exactly the same size. That isn't right. No one can EVER convince me it is. You used to be able to toss a thick steak on a barbecue with nothing more than salt and pepper and have a fine dining experience. These things are like tossing cardboard cut-outs on the grill.

Now then....I go over to the seafood section because I want a chunk of fresh Atlantic salmon for sashimi. The salmon is all raised in Canada and it is a sickly brown. And that is AFTER they have added color to it. I look around and notice that EVERYTHING THERE is farm raised. Hey, I want fish fresh out of the ocean, not something that has been raised in a grey-water recycling pond so they don't have to pay for fish food. And little signs are appearing on fish products behind the counter: "This product treated with carbon monoxide". Why would anyone need to treat food with carbon monoxide? You will have to look it up.

Chocolate bars are now colored wax. In particular, anything made in the USA or Japan. When I was a kid, chocolate melted in the sun. That Hershey bar you just paid $3 an ounce for won't even melt in a microwave oven. You could pave streets with them. If I want to eat wax, I'll buy a scented candle.

Chicken. Healthy, right? I reckon not. The chicken butchers sell the leftovers to the cattle ranchers for feed and the cattle butchers sell the leftovers to the chicken farmers for feed. Pig farmers throw fast-food slop to the pigs and the pig butchers sell the useless parts to the fish farmers or, as I said, the fish farmers grow their catfish in waste recycling tanks. If I throw chicken on the BBQ a nasty green flame comes off of it for a second or two. Hey, what burns with a green color?!?!? NOTHING IN A CHICKEN!

In the mean time the pigs shit E-coli all over spinach and everything else so your veggies are all contaminated.

But hold the phone. Is any of that illegal.....or even regulated? Not at all. Everyone is on the honor system.

Oh, wait! CHEESE! Do you people know how cheese is made? If I told you it might make you hurl, so I won't. You can look it up right after CO (Carbon Monoxide).

So I go to one of the local farmers and buy sweet corn but I won't take just anything fresh-picked. I shuck it on the spot and take only the ones with caterpillars in them. If a caterpillar is eating it and is still alive, it must not be poison.

I get the tomatoes and lettuce out of my backyard so they are organic. I let the bugs eat enough to keep them happy, but I chase off the slugs.

I am on a water catchment system. There is no county water out here and that's fine with me. We get a lot of rain and I developed a little water filtration/decontamination/sterilization system that I pump the water through before it gets to the real filters. It was pretty easy to make, too! I just scraped the radium off about a hundred old alarm clocks and put it in a filter. As long as it is glowing I know it's working. The only problem with the water is that this pink stuff is all over the inside of the shower and I can't kill it, even with Lysol and Clorox. But whatever it is, pink stuff can't be bad for you, right? Anyway, my catchment water is like a crystal clear mountain stream compared to most of them which have drowned rats and what-not floating in the tank.

OK, I'm kidding about the radium.

Are you a sucker?

Are you a sucker? Can you tell an Internet scam?

It is usually unnecessary to investigate these suckertunities in more than a very cursory manner because the warning signs are loud and clear. If something is logically muddy, it is either a scam or an incredibly stupid business plan. Either of those possibilities bode badly for investment.

*The mantra of dumbasses is: "You don't UNDERSTAND". If I don't understand and no one else does either because the suckertunity cannot be understood by anyone except the marketing or financial genius who made it up, it's a scam.

* ~AGAIN!~ If no one (especially YOU) understands how it works, it's a scam.

* If it smells of fish either cook it or date it but don't buy into it. It's either a scam or a slot machine with an empty ring finger.

*The more hype attached to it the more likely it is a scam.

* If there are 'sizzle' calls it's a scam.

* If it has a 'product' but the product is not the main focus of the business, as with Custom Sucker Homes, it is definitely a scam.

* If the 'product' is based on scientific theories or physical laws which do not apply in our universe it is a scam.

*Anything which guarantees a return over ten percent a YEAR or uses the term 'ROI' is a scam.

* If it is 'offered' to a list of proven suckers, like P$, it is a scam.

* If it has a 'prelaunch' which purpose is to collect money it is a scam.

* If the advertised launch date comes and goes with no launch it is a scam.

* If the preferred payment processor is cash in a manila envelope it's a scam.

* If it doesn't have the legal status it requires to do what it says it is going to do where is says it is going to do it, it's a scam.

* If the owner is caught in a lie or a string of them or has been involved in other shady deals it is a scam.

* If someone sells you a $255 ounce of silver because there has to be a token product but in reality you are paying for something else, it's a scam.

* If someone says they have a Ponzi which is 'legal' because of a bunch of incomprehensible babbling bullshit, it is a scam.

* If someone says they have "the next big one", it is a scam.

* ANYTHING registered 'offshore' is a scam. Anything referring to money in it's name is a scam.

* Anything based on faith, trust, divine intervention or belief in the owner or a television evangelist instead of common sense is a scam.

For instance, you CANNOT buy a 'right to receive' money for pennies on the dollar. Only a complete fool would fall for something as stupid as that.

AND FINALLY, ~ATTENTION PIPS DUMBASSES~: IF THE FEDERAL, STATE OR NATIONAL AUTHORITIES HAVE RAIDED THE PLACE AND CONFISCATED EVERYTHING YOU CAN BET YOUR SWEET BIPPY IT'S A SCAM!

Some people, maybe most of them KNOW it is a scam and join for the excitement, like being addicted to gambling. They KNOW it is a Ponzi and they KNOW it will fail eventually. That it cannot be even remotely legal does not play into their reason for joining. They merely want to get in early enough to make some fast money and bail out leaving the rest of the dumbasses to foot the bill. But that same propensity for dishonesty hallmarks another character flaw. Greed. You gotta know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em. Even people who are initially in only for some fast cash can't stop if they happen to get lucky. Like Dan Vail and fffloyd.

Q & A

Q: Can I earn millions of dollars on the Internet by sending money to someone I never heard of who has a secret way of making money?

A: No. The 'secret' way of making money is to get suckers to send it to him. That's why it's a secret.

Q: I'm at the top of a new matrix program. I got in early as soon as I heard about it! Why don't you think I will get rich?

A: You aren't at the top. By the time someone says 'get in early' the top is full and they are fishing for suckers. In addition it is illegal and when it folds everyone YOU talked into joining will be able to sue your dumb ass off. That moron who posted all the pictures of himself at PIPS Hawaii is liable to be in deep kim-chee about now.

Q: I have a friend who....

A: No you don't. The 'friend' is either getting a fee for sucking you into the scam or is trying to get out of it himself without losing money, or both. Either way you are being knifed in the back.

Q: I just paid $255 for an ounce of silver and something else. Do you know what I bought?

A: Yep. Here's your sign.

Q: I sent my family's life savings to Bryan Marsden and am praying for GOD to change the physicals laws of the universe for me so this will all be a bad dream and I can get rich after all. Will GOD answer?

A: He already has. if GOD loved you, he would have given you a brain. Even the scarecrow got a diploma from the Wizard of Oz. Enjoy a life of poverty, dumbass. Suicide is your only way out.

Q: Why should I believe you instead of someone who is promising to make me rich?

A: Because I am not asking you for money. I have no vested interest in what you do but I have an interest in moral and ethical conduct. I won't promise to make you rich but I WILL promise that a scammer won't make you rich either.

Q: I have been 'taken' before but isn't success just a matter of finding the right opp and maintaining a positive attitude?

A: No. It's a matter of becoming functionally literate, finishing college and getting a good job that you like with health and retirement benefits. Then you can think about exploring other possibilities. Do you ever read Dilbert? Scott Adams did exactly that.

Q: I like dreaming about being rich so I keep joining opps. Is that really so wrong?

A: No. Don't stop smoking either and don't look both ways before crossing the street. Eat three meals a day at McDonalds and never exercise. When your cell phone gets so hot it burns your ear, switch to the other ear. You can't trust bottled water so drink a lot of sugary, carbonated drinks and several vente white chocolate mochas from Starbucks every day. Fruits and vegetables are for sissies. You can get all of the vitamins and minerals you need from chocolate, beer and aerosol cheeze spread.

Q: Isn't Social Security a pyramid scheme?

A: Yes, but with three important differences from a Ponzi. (1) No recruiting is involved. Everyone is 'in' by law. (2) You are allowed only a certain amount of money each month, barely enough for food. (3) You are only allowed to collect it after you are already legally dead according to the actuarial tables. (4) I don't care because it won't go belly up before I get mine. :-)

Q: Why are you so negative?

A: Shut up, bitch.

Q: Why can't the government protect me from scams?

A: The government is busy protecting ungrateful bastards like you from Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction by invading Iraq. And now that we are firmly in control of the largest producer of oil in the region, we are reaping the benefits by being able to pay $4 for a gallon of gas instead of the $1 it used to cost.

And there is the Louisiana experiment which cost the President two days of his valuable vacation time. HOW DARE a city full of poor black people drown with so little thought to the President's vacation! :-O

You are free to spend your money any way you want.....except to purchase things the government says you can't have....and if you lose it, it's your problem. But don't YOU EVEN THINK about going 7 miles over the speed limit!!!!!


--------------------
Non-Reciprocal Laws of Expectations: Negative expectations yield
negative results. Positive expectations yield negative results.

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.