Alright – another day. Let’s see what’s happening out there; let’s try to be upbeat.
Well, Bush has successfully frustrated any momentum at the G8 meeting to craft anything with definite edges on it. Bush’s actions (can we call them successes?) at the G8 meeting expand farther than that august body and its pontifications because he has also, within the last week, probably put the final nails in the Kyoto coffin and left Kyoto II stillborn.
So, nothing’s going to be done but what can be done without interfering with ongoing consumption patterns and economic growth – that’s was a central part of China’s pledge to try to do better environmentally. Jeez – that made me feel better. Australia has also begun to think environmentally but only if the economy is not damaged. Oh, that’s good – we certainly wouldn’t want to put a crimp in anyone’s consumption obsessions.
The US feels so strongly about the rightness of this “Consume, Grow the Economy and Ignore the Nay Sayers” mantra that they’ve decided that even the military’s concerns are probably just tree-hugger deceptions.
Meanwhile, the UN is warning that millions of livelihoods will be affected by declining snow and ice cover as a result of global warming.
Well, that environmental stuff is such a downer – let’s find some better news. Ah, here’s a breaking news item via Email from CNN. “Preacher’s wife Mary Winkler, who killed her husband with a shotgun blast to the back as he lay in bed, is sentenced to three years — 210 days in prison and the rest on probation.” Well that’s not too bad. We’ll just have to overlook the fact that there are currently folks in Texas serving hard time for possessing a few joints of marijuana. And that there are other folks who’ve robbed God know how many folks of their life savings and retirements with savings and loan scandals who served a few years in plush country-club prisons and then walked free. Equal justice under the law? Teach the up and coming generations to respect our institutions? If we can just ignore a few small inconsistencies and ruined lives, we should be able to smooth this over, eh? No problem.
Well, speaking of crime and punishment, heard the other day that 33% of the entire world’s prisoner population is incarcerated here in the US. That’s pretty amazing considering that we have only 5% of the world’s population. The latest FBI report shows that violent crime is up again. Maybe if we make the punishments even tougher for being poor, everyone will shape up? Does it sound to anyone else like maybe the wealth here in the US is not being distributed sufficiently and that those who are being ground up at the bottom of the pile and who have the audacity to complain or rebel are being humored with prison time so they can better learn their places? Naw, I didn’t really think that! Some one in this FBI report called the new statistics a “wakeup call”. Seems like I’ve been hearing that bell and it’s been ringing for awhile.
It would be nice if the people who think they are trying to make the world a better place would do some regression analysis and see if they could work their way back to the original causative problems rather than nailing bigger and bigger band-aids over the effects. But no. Here’s an interesting report that comes to us from New Zealand. Seems that Scotland Yard is scanning the world looking for “bad people” and they’ve determined that Internet users in the New Zealand cities of New Plymouth and Auckland are the keenest in the world to find recipes for making bombs. Well, I’m certainly not supporting folks making bombs but it strikes me as odd that Scotland Yard’s got it’s nose in New Zealand’s underwear. Maybe the British government has decided that it is easier to locate and suppress problems than to regress back to why such problems occur and attack the problems at their root. Ah, but they are an entire government and a former world empire while I am just a tiny blogger.
Perhaps, if we had a free and idealistic press to debate the issues before mankind fairly, we could better educate ourselves and then elect leaders to represent our concerns and try to get this mess sorted out. But, I read here that the ownership of the world’s media is becoming more and more concentrated in the hand of the rich and elite. And some folks suspect that what they think is in their best interests (globalization, anyone?) may not be in ours?
Gosh, I’m sure I can take anymore cheering up today. I think I’m going to go do some accounting and see if that adds up.