Doom and Gloom
It rained most of yesterday and through the night. The weather beavers on the local television stations have offered up the promise of bright, insolant skies later today, but the dismalness of mist and cloudy darkness that enlivened my Monday morning return to the gym seems to be mirrored in the RSS feeds this morning.
First I get to read in the Wall Street Journal [Link] prattling about the “hidden” costs of carbon dioxide reduction and how it not only isn’t going to happen, it shouldn’t because its not fair. Whether they are talking fair to consumers or just corporate oligarchs is unclear. What is clear is that they are continuing to egg the human lemmings on to extinction.
The sad fact seems to be that it is not a matter of cutting the growth of our greenhouse gas emission, or even of reducing it unless we reduce it to as close to zero as we can get it. And even if we do it looks as if we are looking at something on the order of a millennium before we can get things back down to where they should be.
And since we are unlikely to ever do this, what with corporate oligarchs actively lying to everyone about how they are making things right while continuing to accelerate the approach of the cliff to leap from, and Joe Consumer in denial mode and thus willing, prayerful even because religion is part of modern consumerism, to accept all this prevarication, it effectively makes no great difference what anyone does. Although I still find the former vice president to be an accute rectal pain.
At the same time, there are broad hints again [Link] that the internet is rapidly approaching saturation and will then melt down. So we shall not even be able to rush to our dooms under the distraction of You Tube video. Apparently we have reached the point where the instrumentality of the internet is another piece of national infrastructure, like the interstate highway system and the railway system, that no one wants to spend money on maintenance.
And I find at least some positivity in Mark Shuttleworth’s comments [Link] about how ill advised it seems for MegaHard, a content company, to purchase Yahoo, another content company. The problem, at least with the internet, is all about content. Something in excess of 0.9 of what information flows on the internet these days is entertainment, not business, not science and engineering, just entertainment.
Sounds like a good thing for the last surviving human to scratch on the species’ headstone.
