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United State of Terror: Is Drone War Fair?

Monday, June 22, 2015

Science Friction: The Frisson of Science and Fiction.


Who can help but chuckle at Hoofinmouth, the senior Senator from Oklahoma, who leads the God-Offal Party's Troglodyte sector and receives enormous amounts of campaign money from fossil fuel companies who pay him to deny that anything  mankind could do would effect the weather, even as his state shudders from becoming the most active earthquake zone in the country, from the freedom to frack and crack, while simultaneously being deluged by yet another series of what he apparently believes are extra-terrestrial rain storms.

As we cluck our tongues and shake our heads in a display of our superiority over such reality-denying hubris, a Facebook entry in which a user posts the suggestion that we should be building pipelines from the flooding Texas and Oklahoma regions to bone-dry California, to which another adds the further exaltation that if we can build a pipeline for oil, why not one for Water? This is after a week or two of seeing posts suggesting that all California need do is start building desalination plants, and recycling water from their toilets to their faucets.

Each of the people who advocated these ridiculous solutions to California's water crisis, which, it has been suggested, rightly so I believe, that it is not a crisis, as crises come to a head and then are resolved, whereas this one, much like the so-called financial crisis, is not so easily put to rest and so would be more aptly defined by the phrase water-predicament, much as the financial crisis would have been more aptly described by, 'world-wide global depression'. And very similarly to the Global Depression, all the solutions suggested and those more than likely that will be tried, such as the current one of pumping out all the ground water until there's simply none left, are patches: sewn on to obscure the deteriorating condition of the underlying garment, but which, once the fabric has been completely obscured by them, will give way to show the true barrenness of the underlying condition, and hence the paucity of such unseamly (sic) solutions.

And these problematic reactions to problems caused by climate change are not made by climate-deniers, but by those who believe the science behind climate-change being anthropomorphic, so how do you reconcile such energy-intensive solutions to a problem that has been created by the very mindset that uses energy-intensive solutions that caused the climate-changing pollution in the first place? Who is really in denial here? It gets harder and harder to tell which group is the more ridiculous.

Are they aware, for example, that before the recent deluge, Texas and Oklahoma were both in historic droughts of their own? So let's build a costly, environmentally-damaging pipeline from one desert to the other, exacerbating the very conditions that brought the drought to both, as pipelines are very energy-intensive, both to build the materials for and to lay. 

And as sea life off California's coast becomes more and more stressed by both a warming Pacific and an accumulation of irradiated genetically-mutating cesium and strontium-90 concentrated waters, lets add more CO2 to the air to further warm the oceans, as those plants are not going to be powered by solar, and concentrate the salt in the water as well, because what's going to happen to all the resultant accumulation of NaCl? If you don't know the answer to that, let me give you a hint: Whatever's cheapest; and you can figure out from there what that'll mean.

Finally, as for the 'toilet to faucet' scenario, how about not shitting in the water in the first place, considering that we've already spent fucking millions to both transport and clean it? How about that? Is the paucity of our scientific knowledge so acute, our imaginations so blighted, our habits so calcified that we would stomach a solution that would necessitate spending further millions to clean water so that we can enjoy the privilege of defiling what is obviously a precious commodity anew? Because, just as now, most of that newly- filtered and treated water will not be drank, the vast majority of it will go right back into the same toilets from which it was flushed and then used to carry more filth back to the plant where it can once again be filtered and chemically adulterated so that it can yet again be used for more fecal despoilation. What kind of mindless morons have we morphed into?

And why would we do such a thing? Well who do you think benefits from such a concentration of sewerage? Do you not realize that, as a product of a biological process, 'waste' from metabolism is not waste at all, but is feedstock for plant growth? The reason no other method of transporting or transforming human feces and urine into beneficial fertiliser is that Corporations can use the huge public expenditures necessary to insure we keep using a water-borne, centralised method of disposal to enrich themselves and collect all that nutrient-rich exudation and ship it to China where they have no qualms about using 'black soil' to fertilize their food crops, which can then be shipped, despite, as per the TPP, any objections we may raise, to a Supermarket (except they are disappearing) near you.

All of which impoverishes us and enriches the Corporations, and which is the paradigm for the supply-sided economy: build solutions profitable for Corporations, using pubic monies, such that there is nothing else to do but succumb to the 'Build it and they will come' philosophy of CorproCapitalism. And because we have allowed the military to promulgate this business model across the globe via invasion, base-building and drone-enabled destruction, all in the name of spreading Demockracy, the US has now done for 'Capitalism', what the Soviets did for Communism: made it anathema to all the populations of the globe that are being left scratching in the dust as Capitalism rides into their country promising the earth but instead defiling it.


Democracy promised that the majority rules, but, even as the US Congress, after centuries of Democracy, becomes more and more dysfunctional because of the cranky tantrums of a vocal, vicious  minority, we insist that it can work in countries where it's never had any history and that has neither the institutions nor the mindset of a population ready to direct their own affairs. But that is never what the Bush junta had in mind in the first place anyway, they merely wanted to short-circuit the route to corporate control it's gotten here in the good ole USA, which it achieved mostly by wrangling the US Supremes to give all the power in the land to monied interests, having taken it away from the people via Citizens United and a host of other Corporate-bought rulings, that also enable a minority of well-heeled 'citizens' to either deride or ignore, since money is free speech, majority rule, imposing their own will onto a public that ostensibly rejects it but passively accepts it. 

Something is rotten in the current state of Democracy, and by spreading it, the West is despoiling its image around the globe more than any amount of Soviet propaganda was ever able to do. Far from becoming the end of history, the Fall of the Berlin Wall seems to have instead ushered in the end of the same Liberal Democracies it supposedly enshrined forever, as it extended to them, just as Lenin suggested it should, enough rope, which has been used exactly as recommended.