Yesterday, I found a line I’d jotted down earlier this year about the Zika virus. That problem has disappeared now from the media and hence the public eye because the snow birding season is over, but it’s still worth a passing mention. At the time, it occurred to me how much it takes to change people’s habits. The winter holiday in the sun has become so ‘traditional’ and ‘necessary’ now that almost no risk is high enough to warrant a cancellation. The exchange rate doesn’t matter, the pollution from excess air travel doesn’t matter and even the threat of brain damage to one’s impending offspring doesn’t matter. Let’s all go play on the beach. Everyone else is doing it and besides – we’re worth it. And that’s probably true because natural selection always filters out the retarded in one way or another. Of course one is free to waste one’s hard earned money any way one wishes; it’s a free country. As the British philosopher David Hume observed in his Treatise on Human Nature – we are governed more by our passions and by self-interest than by reason.
As far as the environment goes, in a clip seen regularly on the Love Nature Channel one senior TV meteorologist claims that it's too late and that we're just going to have to accept global warming and adapt to it, as if mitigation of the problem wasn’t worth considering. And other than him, I haven’t heard any ‘weather men’ mention climate change or global warming in a long time despite the obvious and unpredictable irregularities happening around the world. The increasing frequency of drought, extreme temperatures, high winds and ‘seasonal’ storms like typhoons, hurricanes, tornados and ‘nor-easters’ are given no attention or explanation even though there must be ample statistical proof available. Another weather sage, seen nationally in the a.m. flies back to his home province on weekends as regularly and nonchalantly as if it was a trip to the local variety store. Television meteorologists ignore climate change so completely that you’d think they’d been issued a gag order from somewhere on the very subject of their supposed ‘expertise’ – the weather!
I jotted down the thoughts on Zika when the topic was hot. Recently, I came across those scribblings again while starting to organize some collected notes for a new novel. Its working title is Nothing But Bullshit. Those who doubt that the world is changing are free to consider this blog just that, but they do so at the risk of own and their descendants' future.
9:10 PM
In what is a complete coincidence, I see that the Zika virus is once again in the news.
As far as the environment goes, in a clip seen regularly on the Love Nature Channel one senior TV meteorologist claims that it's too late and that we're just going to have to accept global warming and adapt to it, as if mitigation of the problem wasn’t worth considering. And other than him, I haven’t heard any ‘weather men’ mention climate change or global warming in a long time despite the obvious and unpredictable irregularities happening around the world. The increasing frequency of drought, extreme temperatures, high winds and ‘seasonal’ storms like typhoons, hurricanes, tornados and ‘nor-easters’ are given no attention or explanation even though there must be ample statistical proof available. Another weather sage, seen nationally in the a.m. flies back to his home province on weekends as regularly and nonchalantly as if it was a trip to the local variety store. Television meteorologists ignore climate change so completely that you’d think they’d been issued a gag order from somewhere on the very subject of their supposed ‘expertise’ – the weather!
I jotted down the thoughts on Zika when the topic was hot. Recently, I came across those scribblings again while starting to organize some collected notes for a new novel. Its working title is Nothing But Bullshit. Those who doubt that the world is changing are free to consider this blog just that, but they do so at the risk of own and their descendants' future.
9:10 PM
In what is a complete coincidence, I see that the Zika virus is once again in the news.
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