Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

While planting massive numbers of trees will go a long way to cleaning up the environment, cost very little money, and have lots of side benefits, it is still  only part 1 of the solution to our environmental predicament.
Part 2:  The oil and coal industries need to die.  Completely.  They are the ones who are destroying the planet and they must be stopped.  This will not be as economically wrenching as the oil and coal industries spend huge amounts of money to make us believe.  It will  be a bit of an inconvenience for their major executives and share holders, who will  have to spend an afternoon or two thinking about where to invest their millions and billions of dollars, but it won’t be a serious problem for them, because once you have millions  of dollars, there are investment opportunities all over the place.  The employees of  those industries will be able to find work in whatever industries replace them: manufacture and installation of solar and wind panels, engineers, ticket takers and stewards on the new, glitzy high speed railways, electric car mechanics, and so on.
The average person will save a lot of money, because petrol  is expensive and only going to get more so, as we reached peak oil probably  a couple of decades  ago, and now they’re having to poison the ground with chemicals just to extract it.
And we’ll  save  money on health care and live longer, because the air will  be cleaner.  Win-win all around.

I am very glad to hear Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and Rashida  Tlaib, and some of the other new firebrands in the U.S. House of Representatives, talking about a Green New Deal, because that’s exactly what’s needed.  Not just in the U.S., but around the world, if we are to beat that 12 year deadline and save the world.
Fortunately, the U.S. is not the whole world and there are other countries who are showing the way.  Also fortunately, many of the things we need to do will cost very little money.  For  instance, planting trees.
New Zealand has announced plans to plant 100 million trees per year.  I’m not sure how many years they plan to keep it up for, but if it’s more than one or two, that’s a hell of a lot of trees for a small country with two islands.  China is planning to plant a forest the size of Ireland on previously treeless land, and India can bring out tens  of thousands of volunteers to plant 100,000 trees in a day.  These are magnificent efforts and if the rest of the world follows suit, a lot of the carbon particles will  be scrubbed from the air, which will be cooler and shadier.
Trees have lots of side benefits as well.  Fruit,  nuts, sap, wood (although we’d be wise to use less of that until we’ve reforested the world properly), and homes for birds.  If the birds survive, humanity will survive.
Every city needs more trees, because a quiet, tree lined street is such a much more pleasant place to live than a stark, barren, concrete or trimmed grass strip between the buildings and the speeding cars.
Once upon a time, before the advent of agriculture, civilization, and races of men determined to bring the planet to heel, pretty much all of Europe north of the Alps was dense forest, and almost all of North America east of  the Mississippi and south of Hudson Bay as well.  Admittedly, there are now cities and farms, we may never again be a purely  wild planet, but we should try to recreate that native state as closely as possible.

Donald Trump has blamed the recent California fires on people not raking up their leaves, and he sort of has a point.  Although some people may have raked up the leaves in their own back  yard, there were definitely not enough people volunteering to rake up the leaves in  the million and a half acres of mostly national forest that have burned this year.  It’s the tragedy of the commons thing.  That big patch of plastic in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is embarrassing, but getting a boat out there and spending all day scooping up plastic with a net is more effort than people want to make when they can sit at home and watch TV.  We all complain about street crime, but how many people are donning super hero costumes and leaping out at the criminals from the windows of tall buildings?  Not very many.  People are just slackers.
And leaves burn, they really  do.  So do  wooden houses.  I think all  houses in future should be built out of concrete, brick or stone, and built underground so they are safe from the threat of nuclear war as well.  But, are people willing to go so far?  Noooo, they all want houses that ‘look nice’ and ‘have a beautiful view.’  Selfish bastards.
Leaves burn, and wooden houses burn, and you know what else burns?  Trees.   That’s right, trees.  We apparently have far too many trees in our national forests.  If  we chopped  them all down, we would have lots of lumber, which is money, and the forests would be a much safer place.

Last night I went to bed without writing a blog and I hate myself a little bit when I do that because the ‘blog a day’ concept is important to me, it means I get a lot of words out there and that produces ideas for more writing and I now have a lot of books out there (available on  Amazon and Kindle) and that is some contribution to the human race, or at least an offering, like the millions of words  written on bathroom walls in now abandoned buildings.
So, this is a morning make-up blog and I’ll write about my dream last night.  Two things were happening.  Kind of in the background, I had written a poem (don’t remember the poem, about a four liner about some town in Australia, and I’ve never been to Australia) which had become very popular, everybody (in the High School class) was talking about it, but I had signed somebody else’s name, and she was very confused.
But the main event, the sharp and clear focus of the dream, I was in a cafe in an airport and I went to buy cigarettes (haven’t smoked the nasty things for 30 years now) but there were technical problems.  It was a computer order, like they have at all the McDonald’s now and I hate it, although there was an attendant working the board, it didn’t accept my dollars, but wouldn’t void the transaction and let me purchase in crowns, and I had a wallet that was totally stuffed with them.
Meaning?  I don’t know, but I got a filler blog out of it.  Tonight I’ll probably write about the totally fraudulent election in Georgia, or the “Green New Deal,” or something important.

Just had a rather heated exchange on Facebook and it was among people I really like -well, only a couple of whom I actually know, but the others all seemed like nice, but misguided, folks.

The original post, from a person I know in real life and admire greatly, was “I just don’t understand all the vitriol directed against Hillary Clinton.”
When I hear that, I feel duty bound to explain the reasons for the vitriol.  It ranges from her voting record, to her sense of political entitlement, which we saw on full display in 2008, and then again in 2016, to her irritating voice (didn’t mention that because it would have led to charges of misogyny), to her corruption, to the murders.
It wound up with most of the people thinking I was a bit of a crackpot, I think, but that’s O.K.  I prefer the term ‘independent thinker,’ but it’s kind of the same thing.
To tell the truth, I’m a much nicer person in real life than on Facebook; an easy going, non-confrontational type.

But, that’s what social media is for, I reckon.  To let us be a little bit more direct than we might face to face, because if we talked to each other like that face to face, somebody would get punched in the nose pretty darned quick.  And directness is good.  At this point in human history, I feel it’s even necessary.
Let’s get everything out on the table, and then we can sort through it.