To blog or not to blog...

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
- Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

At first this whole blogging idea was out of my league. I didn’t know how to blog, rarely read blogs (unless they were lifted into an article) and had no idea what to blog about. Since it was required that I learn all these things in order to pass this class I have adapted. As I learned more and more about blogs I even put one to work for my fellow students. It has nothing to do with this class, but if I hadn’t taken ENG 112 this semester I would never have known that a blog could be such a powerful instrument. I am not proclaiming that my blog is causing any radical change, but it is getting attention. Not all positive of course, which is sort of what I intended. I have now found an outlet for my rebellious side.

For one of the things I have developed a keener sense of during this blogging experience is that ANY publicity is good. Especially if attention getting is your goal. If you were a Republican spin-doctor, having one of your party outed as homosexual on national TV is A-OK if it dominates the news and distracts from another over inflated budget for the war in Iraq. For my part I don’t care if someone is shouting for my head on a pike, as long as they do it in front of someone, who mentions it to someone else, and they relate it to someone else, etc. etc.

I will venture an observation about this blogging adventure though, as long as (hopefully) no one throws heavy objects at me in class. In discussing things in our groups we all seem to have a harder edge or view about our subjects but it almost never comes out in our blogs. We automatically tone it down to make it fit for public consumption. Never discuss the bad aspects of our topics. Myself included. I wanted to make a sham and a mockery of the whole media machine, citing specific examples of blatant lies and sleight of hand by the spin-doctors. What I did was create a weak generalization about how some aspects of the media aren’t what they seem to be and how they are readily misconstrued. I think I failed even at that.

I was talking with Byron about his global warming topic. What you almost never see in any global warming discussion is what could be considered one of the roots of the problem. Mainly because it is just bad news and we do not and cannot engineer a way out of it, in a humane fashion. If you magically got everyone in the world to half his or her emissions would we be saved? You’d think so but not really, we are just delaying things. What no one brings up is the fact that our planets population doubles approximately every 40 years, maybe less as the population grows. So in 40 years we are back at square one putting out the same amount of pollutants, and since we need more living space there is less forest to convert it into oxygen.

Keep halving our emissions to keep pace and soon we’ll be back to using a manual hoe to work our fields because we can’t use a gasoline powered tractor. Which might work except we’ll need to cultivate so much land to keep everyone fed we’ll need to lower our emissions even more to allow the planet to keep up.

Since the planet seems to have a restart built in, I would be more curious about what causes an ice age and how close we are to that. It seems to be Mother Nature’s way of keeping our population in check. Always yelling the sky is falling due to the worse readings ever sounds a bit like sensationalism. We’ve been around at least 2000 years and only had accurate instruments monitoring the ice caps for the last fifty or so. I am all for slowing global warming and staying around as long as possible, but sooner or later someone is going to have to deal with how to control us and not the planet, and that person is the one no one will want to hear.
Keep blogging though Byron!

"I don't get it..."
"You were not put upon this Earth to 'Get it' Mister Burton!"
Lo Pan
1st Chinese Emporer