Happy about the pope's climate encyclical? Not so fast.

In his encyclical on protecting the planet, Pope Francis pushed the idea that climate change is all about industry, selfishness and greed. The elephant in the room, of course, is that he's unwilling to consider the benefits of sensible population control. Women gotta have babies. They gotta, especially if they don't want to. After all, they're just breeding stock, and you don't want them to get uppity by having too much control over their lives. Barefoot and pregnant is how women are supposed to be.

Nick Cohen nails this issue down for you. If you were pleased by the pope's encyclical, do read it. This pope isn't liberal. He's got a few nice ideas but he's bound by inane Catholic dogma -- which pretty much ruins everything.

Climate change is real

Photo of sun's surface.

There's an article on the New York Times website called The American Allergy to Global Warming. Why?. (It's an AP product, published on the Times site.)

What I like about the article is that it states in no uncertain terms that global climate change is no phantasm. Global warming (the term they use) is real. It goes on from there to discuss the dissenters in America who make believe nothing's happening. But what warmed my heart was the early part of the article where they really socked the facts to readers.

Sad to say, you hardly see this in American newspapers. Kudos to the Times (or is it AP?) for this rare peek at reality undistorted by corporate influences. Now could they please start talking about the economy in similarly realistic terms?

Photo credit: The photograph above is one of many taken by the Japanese Hinode spacecraft. That's the actual surface of our sun! Cool, huh? (Oh wait, maybe that's not the right word.)

Defensive indifference, round two

I read an article on physorg.com today about longevity. In it, a scientist predicted that within 25 years, humans would be born who would live for 1,000 years. Never mind whether he's right or not. Let's just think about how this would change things.

For the sake of argument, let's take the idea a step further. What if we could undergo a treatment today that made us live for 1,000 years? You know what would happen almost immediately? Suddenly everyone would care about global warming! Because it would affect them.

You know I'm right. People are so goddamn selfish that they're willing to let the world die as long as it happens at a later date, to someone else. But make us all live for 1,000 years and suddenly people would care about the future, because it would be their future.

This thought is disheartening because it's obviously true. Defensive indifference: people don't care about anything unless it affects them personally. And so today I send out a big "ugh!" to the human race. Perhaps we don't deserve to prosper as a species. Maybe it would be best if we simply went extinct. I just don't know anymore.

PS: If you click on the link above to read the article at physorg, you may notice that the title of the article, "Is living forever in the future?", is literally senseless. The headline should read, "Is living forever in our future?"