hunter
hunter's JournalThat which others accept with great despair I will embrace as a rising tide of opportunity.
Combined cycle gas power plants, synthetic fuels, solar and wind power, electric and hydrogen powered cars, bell bottom pants, and permed hair are the future, man!
Let's party like it's 1970.
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.
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Nah, that's not me.
It's a human trait that we don't often wonder what will happen after we get what we wish for.
Even the very best of today's "clean" fossil fuel technologies, widely applied and supplanted by wind and solar power, are not good enough.
If we are unable redefine our definitions of economic "productivity" and "success" we will still be screaming down the highway to hell. Solar panels on the roof only make the bus go faster.
If there's anything we can be certain of, it's that those things which are unsustainable will not be sustained. Humans don't occupy any special place in nature. We won't be the first species to experience exponential growth and then crash, and we won't be the last.
I have a few ideas how we might cope with the crash, mostly of the love-your-neighbor sort, or more immediately, the don't-vote-for-Trump sort, but we will crash.
People who criticize that perspective as some kind of self-fulfilling prophesy are simply wrong. The universe doesn't give a shit about what we humans think, doesn't pay any attention at all to our hopes and dreams. A big asteroid could be coming our way and there would be nothing we could do about it.
There's something just as bad coming our way, it's already claiming it's first victims, and it's a catastrophe of our own making. Like we couldn't help ourselves.
As an amateur paleontologist with some formal training and field experience, this is a fascinating time to be alive, literally the end of an epoch.
U.S. Catholics are a very diverse group, similar to Jewish people.
You can find any sort you like, from right wing authoritarian assholes to progressive social democrats who are indistinguishable in their politics from socialist atheists.
I happen to exist in a very progressive and pacifist Catholic community which is for the most part second and third generation Hispanic, Filipino and wild west white people. No Trump supporters there. I've also lived in "conservative" Catholic communities where the Priests are dumber than rocks and the old people are still bitching about Vatican II and slapping kids who don't dress up for Mass.
My ancestors were frontier Catholics, Jews, and Anabaptist pacifists living in the heart of Mormon territory. They were valued as people who could settle disputes outside of backstabbing Mormon politics. A few of them were water-masters and surveyors, later managing the phone lines too. And a few of them were purveyors of alcohol and French postcards. As teens both my grandfathers dreamed of owning gas stations, repairing the automobiles of travelers, and conducting other delicate business on the side. Damned all of them were thoroughly contaminated by the Irish too.
My mom wanted to be a nun when she was a kid. She was jumping through the hoops. Then she met a leering hard drinking hard smoking venal Catholic priest. That was when her Berserker genes asserted themselves.
My mom still had a bunch of kids Catholic style, drove a car with "Choose Life" license plate frames, but her method of preventing abortions was to be an evangelist for birth control and happy safe consensual sex. Me and my siblings were all terrified we'd have unplanned for children because my mom told us she'd take them as her own if we could not, and none of us wanted the three bedroom house to be any more crowded.
I was changing babies' diapers when I was ten years old. I knew babies were a messy business. I also knew where they came from.
When I was a teen my mom had a local radio show and she invited the Bishop who was in town to speak. It was a perfectly lovely show, how we should support the local Mexican farmworker community and everything.
After the show, myself an unfortunate witness, my mom brought up the issue of a local pedophile priest who'd been transferred to Ireland. The argument ended in a literal queen of all she surveys bitch-slapping match that my mom won. No, not just words, but actual bitch slapping. Later that year my mom ghost-wrote a ferociously anti-Catholic book for someone who'd been abused as a child.
I'm a son of a bitch.
Nevertheless, I'm some kind of Catholic. That's my community. Human baby souls do not get to choose their parents or where they will be born. It's all fucking random.
My wife and I enjoyed a big Catholic Wedding and I was terrified the night before, not about getting married, but that my mom or her literally religiously insane wild west mother (who was later buried in a plain wooden box with a Star of David on it) would make some kind of scene. My dad's dad did not attend our wedding because I was, in his own words, marrying a "Mexican Girl."
He got over that.
Profile Information
Name: HunterGender: Male
Current location: California
Member since: 2002
Number of posts: 38,309
