Death By Denial

Every week there is some level of human activity that makes me think, "We're not going to make it".

Often these activities occur within the government, but it doesn't have to. We're all human beings, politicians too, so the only reason I'm harder on them than I am on the general populace is because they stand front and center in the mainstream media limelight. The late great comic legend George Carlin put my sentiment to words best, "Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out."

This week, the human activity that's making me plant my face firmly in the palm of my hand in bewilderment is taking place in Copenhagen. Once again, we have the mainstream media to thank for putting the proper focus on events taking place, which they have dubbed Climate-Gate. I am being completely sarcastic, of course. There is something scandalous that has been uncovered in Copenhagen, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the focus of the media circus on the East Anglia e-mail hacking, where the purported "scandal" has been debunked. The real scandal is "The Copenhagen Diagnosis". Sharon Astyk explains:

"The Copenhagen Diagnosis, overshadowed in many place by the East Anglia Climate Scandals, was a review of all the major climate papers published since the latest IPCC report, and the picture it paints is deeply disturbing. The window for radical action is getting much, much smaller very rapidly. For example, we've seen rapidly increasing greenhouse emissions - and increases not just in the Global South, but in the developed world as well. That is, despite all this good citizenship, in the net, we're still doing way too much harm.
The window for action is very small - the Copenhagen Diagnosis suggests that if we don't make rapid changes by 2015, it won't matter even if we drop emissions to 0 by 2030. Does anyone think that corporate good citizenship is going to make a critical difference in emissions drops on that scale? The truth is that small refinements in energy usage don't address the more basic issue - the need for deeply curtailed fossil fuel emissions. And that curtailment is something that corporations just can't do - they have an obligation to make more and earn more for their shareholders. Even the best willed, kindest CEO on the planet can't do what is most needed."
2015. That's 5 years and one month from now. Not much time for politicians to act.

But hey, don't worry, things haven't really been hot since 1998!

Plus, we might not make it past December 21, 2012 anyway.

So what's the Tiger Woods Mistress Tally up to?