Tag Archives: environmental pollution

The Ultimate Satan Sandwich

03 Wednesday Aug 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics

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Titan in natural color, Cassini spacecraft, April 16, 2005. (Source/http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06230) - In public domain.

With the passage of the debt ceiling/budget cuts deal that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) called a “a sugar-coated Satan sandwich” on Monday, it became clear that conservative politicians are only patriotic when they can make money off of misery. We know that the conservative/reactionary/Tea Party agenda is to ensure that the legacy of the New Deal and liberal America is as charred as the dinosaurs were 65 million years ago. And with it, our futures and the future of kids like my eight-year-old son.

But how will we get to a future with no future, you ask? How will this capitulation — oops, I mean compromise — between President Obama, House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell lead us into the event horizon of a black hole? It will be because the reactionary Republicans and the diffident Democrats will make one big effort to save the US and world economy, to create jobs and wealth. All while breaking treaties, threatening world peace and destroying the environment in the process.

Forget about “drill, baby, drill” and the ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) issue. Think bigger. Think fictitiously big. Think Saturn’s biggest moon, Titan. It’s not only the second largest moon in the solar system (after Jupiter’s largest moon Ganymede), and double the size of Earth’s moon. It’s the only moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere, about ten times as dense as our own. It also has a huge reservoir of organic molecules and hydrocarbons in its atmosphere, and liquid methane and ethane all over its surface, at least as verified via the Cassini spacecraft and its unmanned fly-bys since 2004. Some scientists believe that there’s enough liquid methane and other hydrocarbons under and on the surface and in the atmosphere to power the current world economy for the next fifty million years.

Land of liquid methane lakes, as radar mapped with false color mosaic, North Polar Region, Titan, October 11, 2007. (Source/ http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/?IDNumber=PIA10008) - In public domain.

Because many of our fearless conservative leaders don’t believe in global warming/climate change — but do believe in making money — they would see the recent discovery of the stuff on Titan not as a place to explore the possibility of life. Instead, it would be a grand opportunity to solve the world’s energy crisis. Of course, they’d have to admit that there is such a thing as peak oil, and then have ample evidence that the world has reached peak production to boot.

So, say it’s 2014, and everyone from OPEC to the UN to Exxon Mobil has reported that we’ve reached the outer edge of peak oil. If the neo-con/Tea Party types are still in control of the House of Representatives, or worse, in control of the Senate and the White House, there wouldn’t even be a debate. They’d put together a bill to push through a $100 billion package for NASA to work with Exxon Mobil, Shell and Halliburton in sending a team of scientists, petrochemical engineers and drillers to figure out how to pump Titan’s frigid air and hydrocarbon lakes into massive tanks to return to Earth for our consumption. The companies would have to match the $100 billion package dollar for dollar, which they would do, of course.

If Obama’s in his second term with a divided government, though there would be more protests from environmental groups, climatologists, and grassroots organizations than even with a President Mitt Romney, it wouldn’t matter. With the promise of as many as five million new jobs in three years, and 150,000 jobs to support the Titan “Oil” Pumping mission within the first six months, the majority of anxious Americans would endorse this plan.

Obama would talk about “honoring America’s commitments” to space as exploration. He’d complain about the need to protect the Earth from even more disastrous and accelerated climate change, not to mention the wasting of financial and scientific resources that could leave Titan a moon-sized example of an EPA Superfund site if the mission somehow set the moon’s atmosphere on fire. Obama would even bring up green alternatives for using the Sun and solar system to supply the world’s energy needs. Then he’d fold like a warped desk of cards.

This would violate the Outer Space Treaty, signed by the United States, the former Soviet Union and the United Kingdom in 1967, and by half of the countries of the world in the forty-four years since. Not only are we not suppose to have nuclear weapons in space, the more immediate intent of the treaty, but we’re also prohibited from claiming any part of outer space as an individual nation, as they are the “common heritage of mankind.” The act to drain Titan as a petrochemical resource unilaterally would break the treaty, and leave other space-faring nations into a new and potentially dangerous space race.

So, whether Obama or a semi-fictitious Republican president, the world would compromise with the US government, allowing this cockamamie scheme to move forward without the threat of war if they could receive a twenty-five percent share in whatever hydrocarbons are recovered from Titan. In exchange, a new treaty is signed promising a thirty percent reduction in fossil fuel consumption by 2040, made up for by a twenty percent increase in green energy over the same quarter-century.

McDonald's McGriddle breakfast sandwich, the ultimate Satan sandwich, at 420 calories, September 27, 2006. (Source/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/u-suke/253343509/Yusuke Kawasaki). In public domain under the terms of the cc-by-2.0.

All a great idea. The ultimate Satan sandwich, because if such a mission to Titan succeeds, the new Kyoto Accords wouldn’t mean a damn thing. We’ll be burning methane until we all have to buy oxygen tanks in order to breathe.

Though this is a fictitious scenario, it’s based on a reality that has been unfolding in our country for decades. The unfortunate truth is, between the lustful servants of money and corporations and capitulating national leadership, this Satan-sandwich-story is more of a possibility than us seeing a human being walk on Mars. At least in my lifetime.

The Five Senses of Poverty

20 Tuesday Jul 2010

Posted by in 1, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings

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Abandoned Building, November 2006

Being poor isn’t just a relative thing or simply a state of material lack. It can be measured by far more than the amount of money in someone’s savings account or by the gut-wrenching feeling at the bottom of one’s stomach when it’s time to choose between the telephone bill and the electric bill. Beyond the material and the emotional, the relative state between a lack of money and a lack of a spiritual center isn’t completely measurable. But, poverty, in its most general, community, and familial sense, can be experienced through all five of our physical senses.

1. Smell — This is perhaps the most powerful sense of poverty for any of us. Stairwell in project high-rises full of garbage. The tell-tale scent of overused cooking grease in an apartment or other impoverished living space. The odor of rotting animal flesh, of expelled farts, of roach spray and borax and cheap pine oil. The smell of clothes that have been exposed to all of these smells. Or,

better still, a smell of lingering cooking oil from frying chicken the night before, combined with the body odor and sweat of numerous people, combined with basura and excrement. Not to mention the release of flatulence and the drawing in of exhaust fumes from the outside world by fans running on high because of the lack of air conditioning.  There isn’t enough Febreeze in the world to cover up the smell of poverty.

2. Sight — We can all be fooled by what we see with our own eyes. At least by all but the poorest of the poor in the world and in the US. But children and their faces tell the truth of their lot in life more than any pair of Jordans or dress clothes can hide. The tired, almost dead looks of children, whether in the Bronx or in Burkina Faso. Their eyes detail a sense of hopelessness, a momentary glance that gives away their suspicion that there is no future for which they should be ready for. Of course, there are more commonplace signs around us. Homeless folk in their old, wrinkled, tattered, oily, soiled clothes, with aluminum cans and liter soda bottles in beat-up shopping carts. Women and children looking a bit older than the few years they’ve spent in this world. Unkempt hair, chipped and worn fingernails, dirty faces in public places, can all be signs. But the eyes are the key window into someone else’s poverty.

3. Hearing — The sound of poverty is deafening. It cannot be hidden by clothes, nor covered up by an aerosol can. Take any urban community in which poverty has taken a firm grip. The sounds of living have been disrupted. Adults are out and about, conversing and cursing, foaming and fighting in the middle of the day, the time in which they should be hard at work, in an office or factory or somewhere else. The cries of children out with their mothers at all hours of the night. The constant beeping of cars, the sirens of ambulances and police cars, the screams of mothers, fathers and siblings at hours well past club-closing times. Poverty disables the need for a schedule, the need for a bedtime and a wake-up time, for a rhythm that requires sleep and renewal.

4. Taste & Touch — Though underappreciated, these senses can also be used to deduce poverty, or at least, the lack of things. Taste and smell go together, so many of the smells of poverty find their way to the taste buds on our tongues. The taste of bile, of acid reflux, even of blood usually come with the violent smells of being in an impoverished environment. The rough touch of clothes unwashed, or at least, washed in hard water and without fabric softener, is another indication.

But there’s also the lack of variety that’s typical of being poor that are told to us by taste and touch. Eating almost nothing but processed foods, fast food, or aid food, and the tongue becomes as a dull knife, unable to appreciate the subtle differences between onion and garlic, or the more distinctive flavors of paprika, nutmeg or cinnamon. Wearing nothing but hand-me-downs or hip-hop gear makes one’s sense of touch as rough as a jagged boulder, as unfeeling as stainless steel. Even a close hug in this kind of environment can be jolting and disconcerting.

Through our five senses, it becomes easier to understand why fighting our way out of poverty is so difficult, why being poor can disable and debilitate so many. That so many don’t have to breathe, taste, hear or touch it is the very reason why so many of us don’t understand it.