… to Your Regularly Scheduled Programming.
Queensland, Australia is suffering massive flooding like no time since the 19th century. The Middle East is ablaze with citizen protest movements taking to the streets to oust their US supported dictators. We just found out that the most plausible theory for the greatest extinction event in history — The Permian Extinction 250 million years ago which killed of 90% of all living species — quite probably was caused by a massive infusion of carbon emissions as a result volcanic activity ago burning massive underground coal deposits (remind you of anything similar occurring today?) Prices for gasoline and food are skyrocketing around the globe.
Yet, with all this important news, people on blogs both right and left will spend all day talking about the President’s State of the Union address and the two Republican rebuttals (one just very lame and one that simply drove itself off the deep end of Crazytown). All this for a speech that by the end of the week (if not sooner) will be forgotten by almost everyone including our 24/7 news media.
These speeches are nothing more than Kabuki theater for the Inside the Beltway tribe. Meanwhile global historical events that will change our world are occurring out of sight and out of mind, at least if you go by what you see and hear from our 24/7 News Media reports in the US of A.
Well, all I can say is welcome to life in our new and improved Gilded Age. It only gets worse from here on out for as far as the eye can see. But I’m sure American Idol and the Super Bowl will keep us all happy (for a while) as we decide which bills to pay and which have to be put off so we can eat our Tostitos, drink our mediocre Lite Beer and watch Television to drown out the noise of a world that spiraling down into multiple disasters ever and ever faster.
Heh. We awoke in different moods. Not that your points are not well-taken.
Well, it happens. That’s what makes this place so stimulating, lol.
About the extinction thing: while I definitely think it had something to do with it, I do not think it was the “root cause,” and it was definitely influenced by other factors. I try to shy away from things like that when I’m pretty sure the science doesn’t say that. I’ve always come to find that fear mongering of those sorts turn people off of climate change altogether.
Carry on.
People have been proposing this theory for the Permian extinction for some time. Now they have found the first solid evidence that it (the coal burning) indeed occurred. I did not say this was the definite cause but it now looks like the most likely one as per the scientific discoveries revealed in the University of Calgary paper.
I should also note that the current ongoing extinction event is the largest one since the end of the Dinosaurs, and is increasing year by year. That human activity is closely related to that extinction is pretty much accepted by the scientific community.
There are new species being found.
Extinction is complicated and I have no idea how it works. And those who do oh, noes, don’t have any idea either.
No one here is going out and solve the world’s problems. We do what we can here and keep trying.
The sixties were awful. The country is not like that now.
Extinction rates
I watched the celtics paste the cavaliers and then picked up baby toys and vacuumed. I wouldn’t put it past the president to say something nice but I can read about it afterward.
To go back to a previous discussion, one thing I have in mind, despite the fact that things are evidently going to shit, is that corporate control has expanded to such a degree that the next republican presidency could quite possibly bring about widespread disorder and social breakdown. Sounds crazy but then I could never have imagined the rapidity with which the Bush administration descended into chaotic misrule. Obama is pursuing ruinous policies but he doesn’t seem to be actively trying to tear the country apart.