god is not a proper noun

My thesis: what most people refer to as god is an idea, personified by ethnocentric religions, un-named for sheer effect, and the capitalization of this idea into Proper-Noun-hood is full of logical inconsistencies that ultimately weaken the benefits of believing in such a transcendent being.

Note: I won't try and prove this tonight, as I should be sleeping, but I'm going to go ahead and point the way to what I'm thinking and hopefully not sound like an angry heretic, which is not what I am.

Say two strangers meet and peace is disrupted between them. They only communicate by writing. One says, "you have offended my god, and that is why I must make holy war on you." The other says, "God told me to say what I said, and God's bible says that your god is a crappy false idol," for humans are afterall nothing if not egocentric.

On balance, I call the former man the wiser man. To assume that God is a proper noun is to assume that you're talking about the same god the other person is talking about. To say 'my god' is more accurate, since only a great fool would think that anyone's conception of GOD THE CREATOR THE UNIVERSE ITSELF THE QUESTION AND THE ANSWER TO ALL THEOLOGICAL QUESTIONS IN HUMAN MYSTICISM SINCE THE BEGINNING AND BEYOND THE END OF TIME is the same as anyone else's conception of that concept. It is hubris, aggression, and repugnant ethnocentrism/egocentrism that leads so many people of faith to capitalize their one true god. To not capitalize (especially once precedence has been set and so religiously adhered to), if it offends the Christian or other, shows that a small symbolic correction somehow diminishes their faith, or worse yet, brings the possibility of other gods existing to the forefront of their minds. This is tantamount to walking into Congress and publicly declaring that capitalism is not the best economic system. You'd get stoned, and not in the Dylan kind of way.

Counterarguements they will make and my responses to them:

from wikipedia:
"The capitalized form God was first used in Ulfilas's Gothic translation of the New Testament, to represent the Greek Theos. In the English language, the capitalization continues to represent a distinction between monotheistic "God" and "gods" in polytheism.[6][7] In spite of significant differences between religions such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, the Bahá'í Faith, and Judaism, the term "God" remains an English translation common to all. The name may signify any related or similar monotheistic deities, such as the early monotheism of Akhenaten and Zoroastrianism."
However, one does not need to distinguish a non-plural monotheistic God from polytheistic gods. First of all, it's all theism, so the only reason to distinguish is in the case of reference to a monotheistic god vs. one particular polytheistic god - in which case surely, SURELY, context might provide some hint. Second, although it is stated that God is not the same for any of the Abrahamic religions, a decent reason for God being referred to in a unified way is never given. Other than the interests of ecumenical peace negotiations, I'd say the only reason is to piss off and marginalize atheists and polytheists. Any characteristics of their god that are all shared are probably just good ways to keep patriarchy and oligarchy seeming reasonable and expected in the minds of the serfs.

Same source: "Conceptions of God can vary widely, but the word God in English—and its counterparts in other languages, such as Latinate Deus, Greek Θεός, Slavic Bog, Sanskrit Ishvara, or Arabic Allah—are normally used for any and all conceptions. The same holds for Hebrew El, but in Judaism, God is also given a proper name, the tetragrammaton (usually reconstructed as Yahweh or YHWH), believed to be a mark of the religion's henotheistic origins. In many translations of the Bible, when the word "LORD" is in all capitals, it signifies that the word represents the tetragrammaton.[8] God may also be given a proper name in monotheistic currents of Hinduism which emphasize the personal nature of God,..."
All the names listed here are clearly proper nouns, but religions designed to spread tend to drop the proper name (seems like Christianity does this the most) since walking into a village and saying, "you will all worship Bob" or "Allah" doesn't work as well as walking into a village and saying, "I come representing the one true God who has no name and is also every name you can think of - take these trinkets and the gift of literacy so that you may tithe and be sold to slavery." Note that this last critique speaks to some of the history of Christianity, not modern necessarily - back when the capitalization tradition was started.

Same source (0nly source? we'll see): "Proper nouns (also called proper names) are nouns representing unique entities (such as London, Jupiter or Johnny), as distinguished from common nouns which describe a class of entities (such as city, planet or person).[8] Proper nouns are not normally preceded by an article or other limiting modifier (such as any or some), and are used to denote a particular person, place, or thing without regard to any descriptive meaning the word or phrase may have.
In English and most other languages that use the Latin alphabet, proper nouns are usually capitalized."

So if I'm talking about God, who isn't 'any' god or 'some' god, then God denotes a particular person, place, or thing without regard to any descriptive meaning the word or phrase may have. Congratulations capitalizer, you just anthropromorphized yourself into a shoddy religion that automatically assumes everyone else in the world will point to the sky and agree with you. You probably just pissed off every other culture in the world accidentally because your philosophy innately assumes universal agreement.

More importantly, I'd say that someone enlightened enough to refer to God as 'my god', 'our god', or even Yaweah or something, has a leg up on being well recieved by other human beings who have their own ideas about creation, philosophy, spirituality, and morality. Someone who strictly adheres to capitalization probably also thinks that the U.S. is a Christian nation where God has mandated the sacred unwritten eleventh commandment "Thou shalt be armed at all times, especially at political rallys." Evolution has a thing or two to say about cultures with that philosophy.

and...my wife says lastly...also wikipedia: "Sometimes the same word can function as both a common noun and a proper noun, where one such entity is special. For example the common noun god denotes all deities, while the proper noun God references a monotheistic God specifically."

This outlines the logical fallacies I've been trying to point out. God is not specific. Never has been, and never will be, and I would argue on philosophical grounds couldn't be. Something that is undefinable, transcendent, everywhere and nowhere, and most of all culturally constructed, cannot be a proper, specific, special, identifying referant called God.

Case closed.

Merry Christmas.

I capitalize Merry because it's at the beginning of a sentence. I capitalize Christmas because it is a Holiday known around the world since, though it bears the 'annointed' name, it is derived from a half-a-dozen religions, cultures, and traditions.
Plus it is a great opportunity to focus on peace, charity, joy, and the un-egocentrizing of everyone in your family or peer group. I don't have to go to mass to celebrate Christmas, and I don't have to capitalize god to have faith, feel blessed, or live life as a good person. Meanwhile, it is an important lesson to understand why things are the way they are, and to give a little more room in our lives for the acceptance and empathy of other ways of being.
Oh, and Happy Haunika. If Aimee reads this she knows I meant no offense by misspelling her cultures solstice tradition. I made up for it by capitalizing Happy. : )

Fiction is as Fiction Says - Gary Sutton: The Fiction of Climate Science; Debunked

Why the climatologists get it wrong.

Correction: Why we shouldn't listen to a douche-bag about climate change. 

From a facebook post I felt compelled to write (contained link to article I'm about to shred): 

Gary Sutton sounds like a drunk bum who drank whisky through a Forbes magazine straw, while missing every scientific discovery of the 80's 90's, and aughts, then woke up on a park bench and stammered into the journalistic crowd shouting that everything was nonsense and crying about who put all the bad-tasting cotton in his mouth. 

1. the 70's cooling thing was mostly a media hype. What science was behind it is still valid, but during a great wave of atmospheric data compilation in the early 70's, some scientists thought the data showed a cooling trend - which it did from 1940's to 1970's. Then the trend reversed. Now (and some then) most scientists say the data shows warming on the way. Note also that warming creates further temperature instability (a property of accelerating dynamic systems) so any given year in the future could indeed have snow storms and worse and worse winters, but overall, the global average will go up. 

2. Scientists care about this because a change of a few degrees globally would radically alter the living systems in our biosphere. Hence, if there is a way to exist without pumping shit into the air (keep it out of Clayton's kids' lungs), we would be smart to do so. After all, the Earth can cope with any change - we however cannot. 

3. I agree that gov. hype is b.s., but, just b/c Al Gore looks in need of punching doesn't mean he's wrong. Read Malthus, read Ehrlich, read a world census. You have to be pretty dumb to look at i) an exponential population curve, ii) an exponential per kappita consumption curve, and iii) a heavy sloped linear vegetation (CO2 scrubber) curve in the down direction, and still not see why bringing change isn't just the rantings of your economic enemy trying to change your consumption behaviors. I can kill my neighbor with a lawn mower much more effectively in a direct assault, but if our culture doesn't start bending the curve, we're going to be breathing nothing but cow fart, coal plant, and truck exhaust within a few generations. And all because crapheads felt the need to tranfer-of-affect what they should have felt for Bush on to the first semi-sane political leader we've had since...?... It is all not ALL about government control. It is also about U.S. citizens putting fingers in their ears and going 'la,la,la,la,la'.

 

Here, Mr. Gary Sutton's article begins.  I've interspersed my comments in red - as I often do. It portrays my anger nicely.

Many of you are too young to remember, but in 1975 our government pushed "the coming ice age."

From Wikipedia (and the only reference I can find to any government "pushing" in 1975: 

"The 1975 NAS report titled "Understanding Climate Change: A Program for Action" did not make predictions, stating in fact that "we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate." Its "program for action" consisted simply of a call for further research, because "it is only through the use of adequatelycalibrated numerical models that we can hope to acquire the information necessary for a quantitative assessment of the climatic impacts."The report further stated:The climates of the earth have always been changing, and they will doubtless continue to do so in the future. How large these future changes will be, and where and how rapidly they will occur, we do not know..This is not consistent with claims like those of Science & Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) that "the NAS "experts" exhibited ... hysterical fears" in the 1975 report.[21]"

So, when this guy tries to tell you that he remembers the government pushing stuff, remember that he's probably a highly indoctrinated wacko Libertarian (unlike the cool libertarians that are out there) who saw a PBS special on global cooling in middle school or high school, as it was apparently an widely viewed thing that brought the new sciences around climate change some attention.  Then again PBS is a leftist pinko organization brainwashing our kids so that pot-dealing terrorists can enter our country and...  Between that and a National Academy of the Sciences Report, this is apparently supposed to qualify as "our government pushing a coming ice age".  Maybe he thought the gas shortage had something to do with it too - who knows. (That one was caused by the Oil of Petroleum Exporting Countries, by the way.)

Random House dutifully printed "THE WEATHER CONSPIRACY … coming of the New Ice Age." This may be the only book ever written by 18 authors. The Bible? All 18 lived just a short sled ride from Washington, D.C. Newsweek fell in line and did a cover issue warning us of global cooling on April 28, 1975. And The New York Times, Aug. 14, 1976, reported "many signs that Earth may be headed for another ice age." 

 Cheer up Mr. Tea Party, you can rest assured that the Earth will actually have another ice age in all probability.  They come every 20,000 years or so due to irregularities in Earth's orbit affecting how much sunlight we get and possibly for other reasons as well.

OK, you say, that's media. But what did our rational scientists say?

In 1974, the National Science Board announced: "During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end…leading into the next ice age."

How dare those rational scientists get something wrong.  Naturally we should stop being rational.

You can't blame these scientists for sucking up to the fed's mantra du jour. Scientists live off grants. Remember how Galileo recanted his preaching about the earth revolving around the sun? He, of course, was about to be barbecued by his leaders. Today's scientists merely lose their cash flow. Threats work.

This guy actually thinks that it is politically expedient to advocate tighter regulation of industrial emissions.  He assumes anything the government pays a scientist to do is bogus.  So one guy gets paid to study the flow rate of ketchup and 60 Minutes does a show about it - get over it.  This 'out-of-the-hat government is bad' reasoning is the sure sign of a dim wit.  Remember how seemingly intelligent intellectuals ignored Galileo en masse because they had dogmatic heads up stoic asses and they relied on their worldview to support their own ego's?  Sound familiar my vitriolic friend?

In 2002 I stood in a room of the Smithsonian. One entire wall charted the cooling of our globe over the last 60 million years. This was no straight line. Straight line is neither expected nor necessary to show trends.  Well, not since Gaussian Random Variables hit the scene around 1800. The curve had two steep dips followed by leveling. There were no significant warming periods. Smithsonian scientists inscribed it across some 20 feet of plaster, with timelines.

Last year, I went back. That fresco is painted over.  It's called re-decorating - not the liberal conspiracy you think it is.  The same curve hides behind smoked glass, shrunk to three feet but showing the same cooling trend. Hey, why should the Smithsonian put its tax-free status at risk?  News flash: dim-witted climate change nay-sayer believes the Smithsonian would lose funding if they drew a non-straight line graph of world temperatures. If the politicians decide to whip up public fear in a different direction, get with it, oh ye subsidized servants. Downplay that embarrassing old chart and maybe nobody will notice.

Sorry, I noticed. I'm sorry you noticed and then didn't spend more that an airborne-bird-droppings length of time looking into the history of this complex, scientific, and fascinating subject.

It's the job of elected officials to whip up panic. Panic only gets you votes if you run as a Republican.  Sorry dude. They then get re-elected. Their supporters fall in line.  Dems aren't known for their ability to "get in line".  Neither are scientists.  Once again, mainly just Republicans fall into this category.

Al Gore thought he might ride his global warming crusade back toward the White House. Don't think he's dumb enough to think a power point and a speaking tour/video would win him the presidency.  If you saw his movie, which opened showing cattle on his farm, you start to understand how shallow this is. And by 'this' do you mean Al Gore's whole spiel?  He could be spending millions on reforestation, recycling, alternative energy, but to you those head of cattle are enough reason to ignore his arguments.  The ancient Greeks would be very disappointed in your ability to reason my friend.  The United Nations says that cattle, farting and belching methane, create more global warming than all the SUVs in the world. Which will be true for a few years, until the Indians and Chinese, who don't eat much beef, all begin driving SUVs. Even more laughably, Al and his camera crew flew first class for that film, consuming 50% more jet fuel per seat-mile than coach fliers, while his Tennessee mansion sucks as much carbon as 20 average homes.  Pay attention people, if you're going to criticize Mr. Tea Party here for his dumb economic ideas, you'd better be prepared to forswear all modern convenience - or else! your argument holds no water!  Oh, never mind, I forgot, that's PRACTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE.  THAT'S THE WHOLE PROBLEM!  Put in cap and trade and suddenly the airlines have incentive to move to more efficient flying wing designs and offer some slower flights that use up less carbon per passenger.

His PR folks say he's "carbon neutral" due to some trades. I'm unsure of how that works, but, maybe there's a tribe in the Sudan that cannot have a campfire for the next hundred years to cover Al's energy gluttony. I'm not even going to...at least he admitted he's unsure of how this works.  Al puts money into cleaning up after himself - not that complicated to understand, unless you're a moron and a dinosaur.  I'm just not sophisticated enough to know how that stuff works. Now I'm sure you're a Tea Partier.  Probably thinks Palin is a genius too.  You know you suck if you have to profess your own ignorance of things to get people to like you.  But I do understand he flies a private jet when the camera crew is gone.  Totally agree that Al and others should reduce consumption.  Totally amazed that Forbes would print something full of more fallacies than a book about fallacies.

The fall of Saigon in the '70s may have distracted the shrill pronouncements about the imminent ice age. Actually, the Vietnam war had nothing to do with scientists redacting their former theories.  What happened was the world started warming up again like it hadn't been for the previous thirty years.  Vietnam was just the only other event you noticed in your kool-aid-drunken stupor, so you naturally associate the two concurrent phenomena.  You see, unlike greedy demagogues, when scientists (or President's named Obama) find out they are wrong about something they tell everyone they were wrong, instead of clinging to the edifice of a pater-familia ethic about never looking back and always staying the course.  Science's prediction of "A full-blown, 10,000 year ice age," came from its March 1, 1975 issue. The Christian Science Monitor observed that armadillos were retreating south from Nebraska to escape the "global cooling" in its Aug. 27, 1974 issue.  It cracks me up how he keeps accusing scientists of saying things, then cites popular magazine journals.  Guess they are easier to find on the internet than the scholarly journals that would have the records of what happened beyond what pop culture said.  But, we've already established this guy isn't too deep, so...

That armadillo caveat seems reminiscent of today's tales of polar bears drowning due to glaciers disappearing.  That actually is happening ass munch.  Or did you miss the news about world governments vying for control of the newly opening Arctic passage.  That couldn't have anything to do with global temperature change could it?  Well, even if we don't care about polar bears, I reserve the right to caveat the hell out of a country really only caring about the almighty dollar.

While scientists march to the drumbeat of grant money, at least trees don't lie. Scientists by nature don't march, and trees by nature don't tell us much about anything that happened more than a few hundred years ago.  Sometimes a thousand.  Their growth rings show what's happened in the last couple hundred years maybe! no matter which philosophy is in power. I think he means political party.  Apparently to this guy, being a Republican/Libertarian is a Philosophy (*laughs). Tree rings show a mini ice age in Europe about the time Stradivarius crafted his violins. Chilled Alpine Spruce gave him tighter wood so the instruments sang with a new purity. But England had to give up the wines that the Romans cultivated while our globe cooled, switching from grapes to colder weather grains and learning to take comfort with beer, whisky and ales.  The oldest known tree is less than 10,000 years old.  Then again, this guy is probably religious and thinks dinosaurs were just bones put in the dirt by god to test the true King James believers.

Yet many centuries earlier, during a global warming, Greenland was green. And so it stayed and was settled by Vikings for generations until global cooling came along. Don't think vikings were around since the last ice age.  Greenland is habitable on the edges and stuff, regardless of its not being green.  Leif Ericsson even made it to Newfoundland. His shallow draft boats, perfect for sailing and rowing up rivers to conquer villages, wouldn't have stood a chance against a baby iceberg.  Well at least talking about vikings and violins makes you sound kind of smart.  Kind of.

Those sustained temperature swings, all before the evil economic benefits of oil consumption, suggest there are factors at work besides humans.  Yes.  Many other factors.  Humans have never been a factor until recently when we went from a few million to many billion and from rarely eating meat or burning oil to eating nothing but meat and driving armored urban assault soccer mom vehicles.

Today, as I peck out these words do you really want to take climate change cues from a guy who never learned to touch type?  If so it's called the observation bias and your reason has been compromised, the weather channel is broadcasting views of a freakish and early snow falling on Dallas. Snow in Dallas = all climate change scientists are wrong.  Got it. The Iowa state extension service reports that the record corn crop expected this year will have unusually large kernels, thanks to "relatively cool August and September temperatures." And on Jan. 16, 2007, NPR went politically incorrect, briefly, by reporting that "An unusually harsh winter frost, the worst in 20 years, killed much of the California citrus, avocados and flower crops."  Dumb ass.  Political correctness was only made laughable by the most bleeding of bleeding heart liberals.  But, I get it, you're trying to make your empty headed readers laugh.  Well, I got news for you - NPR isn't sacred to me at all.  I think it sucks.

To be fair, those reports are short-term swings. And by short term, he means a couple days. But the longer term changes are no more compelling says the guy who can't type and thinks Republicanism is a Philosophy, unless you include the ice ages, and then, perhaps, the panic attempts of the 1970s were right. Is it possible that if we put more CO2 in the air, we'd forestall the next ice age?  No douche, you can't claim you're saving the world by commuting in a Hummer.  If anything you're pissing off hippies and ensuring our nation is dependent on foreign oil (which is guaranteed to become more and more scarce and expensive in the next 100 years btw).

I can ask "outrageous" questions like that because I'm not dependent upon government money for my livelihood. You can ask dumb-headed questions like that because you're a checkers-brained individual writing nonsense about a chess-brain level global issue (chaos mathematics is a bit above your head - let me assure you). From the witch doctors of old to the elected officials today, scaring the bejesus out of the populace maintains their status. Agreed.  Funny that you state this in an article that has nothing to do with the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, consolidation of media, our stimulant worshipping culture, the flaws in modern entertainment media, or the attempts to undercut public education by your best buddies over at the Cato Institute.

Sadly, the public just learned that our scientific community hid data and censored critics. Yeah, like five datums and one critic, out of, thousands.  maybe tens of thousands.  Maybe the feds should drop this crusade and focus on our health care crisis.  This dude is DUMB and DUMBER.  If you're going to claim the feds need to drop this crusade in favor of something important they are currently ignoring, YOU SHOULDN'T PICK HEALTH CARE, WHICH THEY ARE CURRENTLY WORKING DILIGENTLY ON.  IN FACT THE WHOLE COUNTRY IS TALKING ABOUT IT.  You should have said Entitlement Expenditures or Torte Reform or something.  They should, of course, ignore the life insurance statistics that show every class of American and both genders are living longer than ever. Imagine what our lifespans would be if all the poor/sick weren't bringing the figures down.  That's another inconvenient fact.  What was the first inconvenient fact?  That it snowed in Dallas or that you watched a PBS special on Global Cooling when you were in high school and have ignored science since then?  I'm just not clear on this last point, though his last sentence did read vaguely like a clincher.

Gary Sutton is co-founder of Teledesic and has been CEO of several other companies, including Knight Protective Industries and @Backup. 

Final analysis on Climate Change:

1. Oil is great - we use it for everything - let's not waste it uneccessarily so our great great grandchildren can find toys in their cereal boxes too. Our cruise ships won't be able to expose the glory of the Tongass National Forest if we burned it all watching Spongebob in the back of the Excursion.

2. Refuting modern science by saying "but they said the opposite thing forty years ago" is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of.  Forbes is now a stupid magazine.

3. Currently in America we need to do several things: quit whining when things change; vote more; educate our kids so they're smarter than we are; quit spending money on wasteful things like guns and bombs (i.e. the bloated U.S. military - now on the road to becoming human-free in the age of drone warfare); start spending money on things that will pay off higher in future dividends (both as a country and as individuals); spend more time thinking and listening and less time bloviating; AND MOST OF ALL, WHETHER IT'S FOR CLIMATE CHANGE, ETHICS,  or just to turn our culture into one of health and economic sustainability WE HAVE TO ADMIT OUR ADDICTION TO OIL AND CONQUER IT.  Since the industrialist rhetoric like this guy spews forth has gone too far, we now have to resort to peoples' empathy for polar bears in order to convince the somnambulant public that there is a crisis we have to do something about.  Gary won't live to see the polar bears disappear.  My nieces, however, might.  (clincher ending).

Climate Change, Global Warming, Global Cooling, and the Fogey's That Don't Buy It

"You cannot find your soul with your mind,
you must use your heart.
You must know what you are feeling.
If you don't know what you are feeling, you will create unconsciously.
If you are unconscious of an aspect of yourself;
if it operates outside your field of awareness,
that aspect has power over you."

~ Gary Zukav

Apparently in the 70's scientists were predicting a global cooling cycle that would bring another ice age. Twice since I've been at UAA I've heard this, followed by an exasperated sigh and a critique of the current debate surrounding Global Warming/Climate Change. I inwardly reacted to this by feeling squirmy and angry, but not really knowing why. Ultimately, I think I worry when anyone seems to be advocating for 'staying the course' of profit-driven environmental exploitation and disregarding the new science of sustainability; the idea that we won't be able to rethink our consumer paradigm in time to share this planet brings about images of global resource wars, mass starvations/diseases, and all kinds of other nightmare images. Furthermore, a world surrounded by nightmare images is exactly the kind of environment where reason and enlightenment dwindle in the face of fear and desperation. Malthus wrote about population explosions long ago. 'An Inconvenient Truth' pointed out some of this, but even Al Gore lives 'on the grid' and consumes products from the great military industrial complex. Few other options exist, and no alternatives exist that don't come with ridicule from popular culture (only dirty hippies live in the mud, grow their own food, don't wash their hair with 'normal' shampoo, etc.).

So, here's what I wish I could say to people who don't want to look further into the details of Climate Change.
First, here's what the Climate Change believers AREN'T saying:
1. Quit manufacturing everything.
2. Give up all your conveniences.
3. We're all going to die if you keep using oil and plastics.
4. We're all going to die if we don't become vegetarians.

Granted, there are probably some environmentalists out there that do say these things, and not without reasons, but by and large, Climate Change is a mainstream concept accepted by people on Wall Street, Main Street, and by the vast majority of scientists who study it.

Here's the concept in a nutshell: every human requires resources (food, lumber, textiles, and especially transportation and stuff). Everyone (except those noble "savages" still left in the world) uses oil, plants, and trees. People 200 years ago used about a tenth to a hundreth the amount of resources as people do today. More importantly, the more everyone lives like Americans do, the more resources they use (by a whole lot - we eat more, waste more, buy more, and trash more stuff than any other culture), and literally billions of people are on a fifty year road to becoming more American-like. This last bit ignites ire in some people. Conservatives are correct that we shouldn't demonize the American way of life. They are wrong who say we shouldn't change it.

American wastefulness comes from prosperity. To make money, here are some things we do broadly: transport people places for pleasure; prepare as much food as we need to guarantee profit maximization during the dinner rush; design products that last a certain amount of time, then need to be replaced; design products that are cheapest to manufacture by not building them durable enough to be taken apart, parts replaced, etc. I don't claim that making money is bad. But, as Ani Difranco says, "what a waste of thumbs opposable, to make machines that are disposable."

Here's a good example. I live in a place that is less than zero degrees half the year and I pay money to freeze my food inside my heated house. Where is the sense in that? OK, maybe it's true that food needs a more constant temperature than 'outside' otherwise it could all spoil in a couple of fluke warm days, but still, we have the technology to be more efficient, reusable, etc. These technologies don't make anybody any money, so they aren't available at the local box store. Simple as that.

Back to Climate Change and Global Warming/Cooling. Now that we understand that people use resources and Americans super-use resources compared to poor people. We all want the world standard of living to increase, so people aren't poor any more. We could make this happen without impacting the environment, but it wouldn't be as profitable as the status quo. The more oil we burn, the more carbon we produce. Every piece of food we buy at the grocery store takes oil to transport, oil to fertilize, oil to spray with chemicals (being an oil based economy means even the chemicals we buy are made by using the energy in oil to drive chemical tranformation processes), and so on. The more papers we read (and don't recycle) the more trees we cut down - same with houses we build, and in the case of South American beef farms, the more hamburgers we eat (rainforest deforestation occurs largely to use inefficiently to raise meat animals since everyone loves cheeseburgers). The more we drive, the more caffeine we drink, the more disturbing shows we watch and articles we read, the more malnourished we become...all these things make us eat more, buy more, and want to consume more. Our culture has even gone so far as to replace fulfillment with materialism. Advertising has made billions over the last eighty years or so making sure we want want want. Climate Change is just one reason - the most compelling reason - to bend this curve and become a bit more native/hippy/counterculture-like.

As more carbon ends up in the atmosphere, less taken out by less and less trees (which doesn't even get into the ocean-change argument), the more solar energy remains in the complex dynamical system we call the biosphere - that which supports all life in the universe as far as we currently know. Energy can be stable and produce predictable weather, but increasing the levels of energy in our biosphere will do several things (a super-majority of scientists agree): make weather patterns more unstable and unpredictable; more heat will melt polar ice caps (oops, I mean are already melting polar ice caps).

Now, the chain of events goes like this: ice caps melt, oceans rise. Oceans rise, and more water is available for absorbing heat energy, and global cooling happens. So global warming becomes global cooling.

Based on sound scientific data, here's how people should think of (or frame if you will) Climate Change: humanity has had a relatively stable period for many thousands of years but the more we super-consume (which by the way only makes us sick, obese, and otherwise cantankerous), the more likely we are to bring the carbon levels to a tipping point. All we have to do to screw ourselves is reach that point once.

Here's the rub: the Earth will survive either way. We really only hold our own survival in our hands. We can become efficient, smart, and less wasteful, or we can become oil for the next species nature endows with reason and technology to use us. We're using up all the dinosaurs (roughly where oil comes from), so it's only fair that we return the favor.

Alternately, consider this: the biosphere is a closed system which, during the time of the dinosaurs contained much higher levels of CO2. All that CO2 turned into Hydrocarbons and atmospheric oxygen, giving us the rich air we breath. By burning all the dinosaurs, the carbon all goes back into the air, and since the biosphere is a closed system, we get to breath the same kind of air that dinosaurs breathed.

But I get it, you don't want to give up what we have, and since solar panels, electric cars, and spending time growing our own food, repairing and reusing our own waste, or worst of all, not buying stuff from box stores, would totally take away our luxuries, you don't like the self-criticism posed by Climate Change scientists.

So warming, cooling, boiling, brewing...whatever. We've created a monumental system based on resource extraction and utilization. Practically everyone in the world is starting to get this at some level or another. I'm sorry those scientists in the seventies told you something that seems like a contradiction. It isn't a contradiction in actuality, and I don't give a crap about the seventies. I care about my great-great-grandchildren, and homegrown produce tastes way better anyway. In the meantime we all get the privilege of feeling like hypocrites, acting like Americans, and striving to be better while applauding ourselves (somewhat hypocritically) for our efforts. All we have to lose is waste, and what we have to gain is the lifestyle of thousands of generations of homo sapien sapiens, which I'm sure we can improve on even if we're living right. Maybe we can keep electric cars and espresso stands.


Ani Difranco: Your Next Bold Move

coming of age during the plague
of reagan and bush
watching capitalism gun down democracy
it had this funny effect on me
i guess

i am cancer
i am HIV
and i'm down at the blue jesus
blue cross hospital
just lookin' up from my pillow
feeling blessed

and the mighty multinationals
have monopolized the oxygen
so it's as easy as breathing
for us all to participate

yes they're buying and selling
off shares of air
and you know it's all around you
but it's hard to point and say "there"
so you just sit on your hands
and quietly contemplate

your next bold move
the next thing you're gonna need to prove
to yourself

what a waste of thumbs that are opposable
to make machines that are disposable
and sell them to seagulls flying in circles
around one big right wing

yes, the left wing was broken long ago
by the slingshot of cointelpro
and now it's so hard to have faith in
anything

especially your next bold move
or the next thing you're gonna need to prove
to yourself

you want to track each trickle
back to its source
and then scream up the faucet
'til your face is hoarse
cuz you're surrounded by a world's worth
of things you just can't excuse

but you've got the hard cough of a chain smoker
and you're at the arctic circle playing strip poker
and it's getting colder and colder
everytime you lose

so go ahead
make your next bold move
tell us
what's the next thing you're gonna need to prove
to yourself