The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
June 5th
LAUGHING OURSELVES to DEATH!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
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"How
can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to
us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water,
how can you buy them?" |
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- Chief Seattle (1853) |
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If there's a
consolation to this age of downsizement, devolution
and disparity between America's have-nots and have-everythings
widening like the San Andreas Fault, deep between the surface, it might just be
that... for all the desperately energetic endeavors of Entropy and plain bad
government since twenty-two November, six decades back... we still produce.
Our fields and
plains still teem with fruits and grain, coal still waits to be yanked out from
beneath the West Virginia and Wyoming soil; pigs in pens are squealing in
Missouri and in Iowa, gas awaits fracking there in
Nebraska. Iron dwells beneath
Minnesota's Mesabi Range, with plenty of hands on hand to shape, dig and
fashion, if America will only let them. World trade summons great tankers to
our ports, laden with
As
The doomspeakers at environmental, population and energy lobbies
have an old but not wholly unmeritorious argument as regards the too many
people as are walking up and down over the world. Eight billion human beans
on our planet as of last week – a planet that can tolerate maybe that many millions
and the plague as didn’t thin the herd by one mangy ol’ heifer, comparatively
speaking. Oceans running out of
the big fish, forcing Japanese to put raw pork, whale, chicken and even… uggh… tofu cutlets
atop their sushi. Dictator Xi holds in
his fist the rare metals as keep our high tech teching
against the day he decides to punish Taiwan for wanting to stay Taiwanese. Pits are running out of tin and copper and, where
population growth is highest, higher rents for have-nots, kited adjustable
mortgages and property taxes for have-somes will set
into being tremors as cannot be contained by any false populist
orthodox politico... left, right or center. Wasn't Seattle or, even, Karl Marx
as observed that "landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they
never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce," it was that
ol' Invisible Finger, Adam Smith - as knew all too well that desperate people,
shoved up against a wall somebody else owns, devise desperate strategies.
Now and again, some wise-use
libertarian presumes we can invent our way out of all of this peril by trusting
Big Science... some of these can be persuasive as an alkie
pleading with you not to take his keys away at two in the morning, once the
bar's shut down. Trust those dudes in the white coats... as
brought us glowing proletarian rats with human ears growing out of the backs,
that aluminum-burning car they're still sorting out lung cancer lawsuits on and
them Challenger and Columbia disasters, as occurred because Morton Thiokol, as
spent millions lobbying to get its contract in the first place, skimped on
eighty cents worth of rubber sealing while them others couldn't design
anti-heat tiles strong enough to withstand a slap of foam. Trust the
experts as those in San Francisco gumment who work
hard developing robots to gun down dark people as might be suspected of
criminality, taking away more American police officer jobs or depopulating the
factories once we decide Chinese and Mexicans are too expensive. Those Wall Street slicks who rammed through tax
cuts for the rich to hire more Americans which they used, instead, to buy more robots; trust our educational system
as churns out what seems like ten lawyers and a hundred hedge fund hedgers for
every engineer, truck driver or schoolteacher; trust them others as devised the
Obamacare website and then those other others as promised repeal and replace, then forgot the
replace!
Remember Biosphere? Not
the Pauly Shore movie... toxic enough, in its own way...
but the real deal, conceived and financed by this billionaire from Rand Paulistan, name of Ed Bass, quarter of a century ago?
Biosphere was this dome in Arizona’s desert with the people, bugs and animals
breathing out carbon dioxide, which would then be recycled by plants, as also
provided food for Biospherians to eat, recycle their
wastes into fertilizer for more plants and so on.
The crew finally entered in September '91, hung on for two years, then
were hauled out, near starved to death and babbling from the oxygen
content having plunged from its normal 21 to 14% and being replaced by nitrous
oxide, which is the dentists' laughing gas. Most wildlife died off ‘cept roaches... didn't need men in white coats to tell you that!...
and these so called "crazy ants" as killed off most of the vegetable
life with the exception of hallucinogenic morning glories and bananas.
More
food for crazy.
"When you see the
complex dynamics here," remarked a Dr. Bill Harris, who was allowed to reopen
part of the facility, years later, as a postcard show and museum of memorable
catastrophe, "you start to understand that the climate models may have
some large error bars."
"If all the beasts
were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit," Ol' Chief
Seattle could've answered. "For whatever happens to the beasts (crazy
ants, termites and cockroaches excepted), soon happens to man. All things are
connected."
I find it hard to contemplate...
though... rats, roaches and morning glories having much grief over the passing
of the human species, as will likely happen long a’fore the Earth's vermin go to their strange and verminous rewards. Maybe the former two will miss those
strange, two-legged slobs as left tasty crumbs lying round! Prob'ly
won't miss our traps and poisons they’ve had to evolve somewhat to escape.
Now I don’t hold
with all of what Austin Tillerman predicts - we
haven't yet seen anything like a third of Earth's oxygen supply replaced by
laughing gas, volcano vog and Toyota exhaust, but the
less-than-one-percent drop as has occurred
over the last half century's melted much of the North Pole, and threatens to
have Miami, New York and New Orleans, following Venice, California into
becoming another Venice, Italy... at best... or Atlantis, at the worst. And,
despite twenty-four hurricanes last season and record forest fires like that
conflagration some wag named the Camp Fire… as if all them Californs
were supposed to toast marshmallows and sing Polly Wolly
Doodle beneath a grinning crescent moon… entropic state and county
commissioners still keep rezoning exurbian
and extra-exurbian former farmland and second growth
forests into five and ten-acre plots as use up whole lakes and rivers keeping
cemetery lawns watered, sprouting McMansions as cost so
much nobody can afford to buy them except CEO's as have moved all their jobs
off to China or hired R2D2s to weld their widgets. And maybe
a few Russian Mafiosi. Some of
these people bein' the talking Charlie McCarthies as, out'n the other
side of their wooden mouths, promise a limitless future of gasohol while failin’ to mention the dollar-twenty ear of corn an’ eggs
four bucks the dozen already.
Meanwhile, our own family
farms have been so jacked-out with foreign retaliatory tariffs and loaded-up
with debt that most are selling out to Cargill, Archer-Daniels and the others
as still have the juice to turn profits-by-volume (with the help of a few
creative subsidies). "The only difference between an American farmer and a
pigeon," opined former Texas Agricultural Commissioner, Jim Hightower, "is
that a pigeon can make a deposit on a John Deere."
Dream, as we may, of
stepping out of Biosphere One into an Art Deco future, that door's locked, keys
tossed or confiscated by the bartender and sump-pumps won't work 'cause... as Mr.
Zimmerman once remarked... "the vandals took the
handles." The earth is precious to God, Chief Seattle wrote President Franklin
Pierce a century and a half ago, "to harm the
earth is to heap contempt upon its Creator.
"Contaminate your
bed and you will, one night, suffocate in your own waste."
CLICK the CATFISH to go to
PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |