While You Were Distracted, Your Ecosystem Fell Apart

The real evil in this life is oblivion. Not knowing what you're doing is harmful, you do it, and then blame others or anyone but yourself. That in turn requires more lies. The spiral deepens and soon you're living to lie to keep yourself from seeing what you are. Oblivion is the cause of it all. Oblivion is innocent: I wanna do what I wanna do. I wanna be on the couch and eat pizza, don't wanna look at tomorrow's problems. We all need a little oblivion. Too much oblivion and we're destructive.

The truth is unpopular. The popular will always avoid truth, although the converse is not true (the unpopular isn't always true, for example, pedophilia or Six Feet Under fans).

Because the truth is always unpopular, human societies are ruled by liars and exist in a commensurate degree of corruption, confusion, deception, poverty, neurosis, self-hatred and oblivion until they're dragged out of the popular untruth into the unpopular truth.

But how can oblivion hurt us?

Well -- we've grown as a species. We have nearly seven billion people on earth, and fewer than 1% are likely to do anything impressive; most are simply too dumb, having IQs well below 110.

But they buy products, and they vote, so our politicians encourage them to keep coming and unscrupulous elements in our industries encourage them -- and then the rest of us have to compete to keep up.

Thirty-five percent of the world’s birds, 52 percent of amphibians and 71 percent of warm-water reef-building corals are likely to be particularly susceptible to climate change, the first results of an IUCN study have revealed.

The report identified more than 90 biological traits which are believed to make species most susceptible to climate change. It found that 3,438 of the world’s 9,856 bird species have at least one out of 11 traits that could make them susceptible to climate change.

Science Daily

When they say "particularly susceptible," they're trying to find a simpler term for "will be out of place with a hotter environment." Birds like penguins depend on the cold; they stop being able to breed and to find food, and die out. That kind of thing. Keep in mind that if you heat the male scrotum to just 99 degrees, you kill most of the developed sperm inside. Small temperature changes can be crucial.

And then there's this gem:

“On a global basis today, we have an average annual consumption of 15-16 kilos of fish per person,” says Almås. “If we are going to continue consuming at this rate, we need to double the production of farmed fish within the next 20 years. Doing this in a sustainable manner will be a major challenge.”

Science Daily

How could we have gotten to the point where our food supplies are failing, we're committing ecocide and wrecking everything in site?

The global economic crisis has thrown a political chill over one of the main initiatives under consideration in the United States to combat global warming: the so-called cap-and-trade plan.

Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate, and both presidential candidates, continue to rank tackling global warming as a chief goal next year.

But the focus on stabilizing the economy probably will make it more difficult to pass a law to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. At the very least, it will push back when the reductions would have to start.

As one Republican senator put it, the green bubble has burst.

"Clearly it is somewhere down the totem pole given the economic realities we are facing," said Tom Williams, a spokesman for Duke Energy Corp., an electricity producer that has supported federal mandates on greenhouse gases.

ENN

Aha, the truth is unpopular.

While you were distracted by the dog and pony show of our economy, and of these pathetic elections, your species is busy wrecking the planet.

The root of their power? We don't wanna do what we don't wanna do. The truth is unpopular, so pay attention to the popular (that's how you make money, make them wanna buy your products) and ignore the unpopular truth. Into the void falls untruth as a means of making popularity. And the distraction goes on and on...

As planetary ecosystems slowly die. Why aren't you mad about it?