Memorial Day weekend 2012 is upon us, and we in central Phoenix are enjoying an unexpected and most welcome respite from the triple-digit temperatures that burst on to us about a month sooner than they should. The high temperature yesterday was in the mid-80s, a good 14 degrees cooler than what's considered normal. When we get lower-than-normal temperatures in Phoenix anytime from May to October, we have something for which to be thankful.
About a week ago we were broiling through temperatures that reached 108 degrees. That does not bode well for the remainder of the summer, which stretches out in front of us like 500 miles of the ugliest, most pothole-ridden, unpaved road imaginable and we're in a broken-down Ford Pinto with no air conditioning.
The tide of summer is poised to sweep over all of us, like a tsunami of horribleness that we know is coming and are powerless to stop. Last year's summer was brutal, one of the very hottest on record. It's a sure sign of advancing age when I am having more and more trouble getting through this time of the year. I know it's a consequence of living in the desert and you would think after 19 years I would be fairly well accustomed to it, but I'm not, and it's just getting worse. I find myself thinking more often of moving to a more moderate climate, like in New Mexico. Santa Fe and Taos are calling to me, and they sound better and better with each passing degree.
During the very hottest days, which are from mid-June until the monsoon season kicks in mid-July, temps can approach 120 degrees. There are no circumstances under which that amount of heat can be considered necessary or appropriate. I mean, seriously, what's the point? What does a 120-degree temperature accomplish that a 112-degree temp can't? Anything past 114 feels like hot death anyway, what's the purpose of going any higher? Coupled with the fact that the overnight temp sometimes doesn't drop out of the lower 90s, and you got yourself a little slice of hell on earth.
Sometimes I think about other seasons when it gets really hot. It helps a little (though not nearly enough) to remember what it felt like back in December and January, when I would wear my flannel pajama bottoms, wrap myself in a favorite cardigan and sit on a warm blanket on the sofa, insulated from the sharp chill outside. Or during our short autumn in early December when you wake up on a bright, chilly morning and go out to see the tree leaves turning scarlet, burgundy, lemon yellow and russet against a turquoise sky adorned with puffy white cumulus clouds. Or our springtime, which starts around Valentine's Day, when the trees and shrubs are covered with richly-colored flowers, just waiting and hoping for any moisture to come down from the sky like liquid manna.
Yes, the tide of summer is coming, and Memorial Day is just the first stop of a long, arduous and debilitating journey, not into a heart of darkness, but a heart of blinding, blazing light and heat. I know there are good days and bad days to come, and just as summer follows spring, autumn will be following summer, although trying to catch of glimpse of it over the vast, parched, desolate wastelands of June, July, August and September, it seems impossibly far-off, like a mirage shimmering in the heat waves far in the distance. You walk toward that mirage and it seems to retreat farther away the closer you get. You will reach the mirage someday, but at a pretty steep price, as it seems like summertime sucks the life out of you like a vampire that hasn't eaten for several centuries and has just been given 15 minutes in a blood bank.
Showing posts with label environment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label environment. Show all posts
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Friday, June 4, 2010
Requiem for a Coastline
After forty-odd days of increasingly horrible news coming out of the spill area of the Gulf of Mexico, today brought the first real glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, engineers might be getting the upper hand in controlling the undersea gusher of crude oil left over from an oil rig explosion. Spewing many thousands of gallons of oil each day into the sea, the resultant oil plume has begun the slow-motion, agonizing destruction of one of the most unique and productive seashores in the entire world.
I think most people still don't understand the enormity of the unmitigated catastrophe unfolding in front of the world. The extremely painful videos and photographs of pelicans and sea birds saturated with thick, greasy, brown oil are so very hard to watch, but maybe that is what is needed to shock people into understanding the real tragedy and impact that the carelessness of humans has wrought on an epic scale.
Nor is there a lot of appreciation of the staggeringly difficult task that plugging the oil vent presents. All this is going on under nearly a mile of water, and there are very few environments on earth that are more hostile. The enormous water pressure, low temperature, currents and visibility issues all come together to make any activities especially difficult. Some idiots continue to say brainless things like, "if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we stop this leak?" Well, morons, putting a man on the moon was an incredibly difficult task, too. The lunar landing didn't just happen, it was the culmination of a decade of planning, engineering and just plain courage. Likewise, stopping this leak will entail a bit more than sending down a giant cork and hoping to be done by lunchtime.
Speaking of idiots, that intellectual pile of sludge known as Sarah Palin for some reason finds it necessary to open her big obnoxious yap about this subject, and predictably a torrent of stupidity rivaling the undersea oil leak blows out. She wrote some kind of incredibly dumb blather on Twitter addressed to "ExtremeGreenies," which I guess is her pet name for environmentalists, and tried to make the point that every time she stupidly repeated her dimwitted catchphrase "drill baby drill" over and over again like a retarded mynah bird she wasn't really yammering about drilling for oil offshore, but rather in places that she regards as environmentally safe drill areas like ANWR (Alaska National Wildlife Refuge). And somehow, she feels the Gulf oil spill proves she was right all along. Excuse me???
I guess this incredibly stupid, sad political hack thinks that an oil spill on pristine Alaskan tundra is preferable to an undersea oil spill. Sarah Palin is a gigantic, infected pimple on the ass of society and continues to redefine the outer boundaries of incompetence and stupidity with everything she bleats out in her annoying trailer-trash Barbie doll voice. Apparently at one point they tried to clog up the leaking oil pipes by stuffing it with cement and garbage like golf balls and shredded tires. What they should have done was stuffed the hole with Sarah Palin and BP executives. It just might have solved a lot of obnoxious problems at once.
It is so baffling trying to understand why that beautiful, serene part of the world is victimized repeatedly by disasters, both natural and man-made. A whole string of destructive hurricanes, topped by Katrina, have ravaged that area in recent years. Oil spills both large and small, continued pollution of the sea and air, the draining of natural wetlands to facilitate human development, and the construction over many years of a haphazard, crazy-quilt system of levees, dikes and dams have forever negatively altered the fragile interplay of sun, wind and ocean that make up the coast. Like watching a terminal cancer patient lose their battle with the disease, the death of the Louisiana coast is a supremely painful and unparalleled tragedy for America, made all the worse by the slow, inexorable and deliberate pace of its demise.
I think most people still don't understand the enormity of the unmitigated catastrophe unfolding in front of the world. The extremely painful videos and photographs of pelicans and sea birds saturated with thick, greasy, brown oil are so very hard to watch, but maybe that is what is needed to shock people into understanding the real tragedy and impact that the carelessness of humans has wrought on an epic scale.
Nor is there a lot of appreciation of the staggeringly difficult task that plugging the oil vent presents. All this is going on under nearly a mile of water, and there are very few environments on earth that are more hostile. The enormous water pressure, low temperature, currents and visibility issues all come together to make any activities especially difficult. Some idiots continue to say brainless things like, "if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we stop this leak?" Well, morons, putting a man on the moon was an incredibly difficult task, too. The lunar landing didn't just happen, it was the culmination of a decade of planning, engineering and just plain courage. Likewise, stopping this leak will entail a bit more than sending down a giant cork and hoping to be done by lunchtime.
Speaking of idiots, that intellectual pile of sludge known as Sarah Palin for some reason finds it necessary to open her big obnoxious yap about this subject, and predictably a torrent of stupidity rivaling the undersea oil leak blows out. She wrote some kind of incredibly dumb blather on Twitter addressed to "ExtremeGreenies," which I guess is her pet name for environmentalists, and tried to make the point that every time she stupidly repeated her dimwitted catchphrase "drill baby drill" over and over again like a retarded mynah bird she wasn't really yammering about drilling for oil offshore, but rather in places that she regards as environmentally safe drill areas like ANWR (Alaska National Wildlife Refuge). And somehow, she feels the Gulf oil spill proves she was right all along. Excuse me???
I guess this incredibly stupid, sad political hack thinks that an oil spill on pristine Alaskan tundra is preferable to an undersea oil spill. Sarah Palin is a gigantic, infected pimple on the ass of society and continues to redefine the outer boundaries of incompetence and stupidity with everything she bleats out in her annoying trailer-trash Barbie doll voice. Apparently at one point they tried to clog up the leaking oil pipes by stuffing it with cement and garbage like golf balls and shredded tires. What they should have done was stuffed the hole with Sarah Palin and BP executives. It just might have solved a lot of obnoxious problems at once.
It is so baffling trying to understand why that beautiful, serene part of the world is victimized repeatedly by disasters, both natural and man-made. A whole string of destructive hurricanes, topped by Katrina, have ravaged that area in recent years. Oil spills both large and small, continued pollution of the sea and air, the draining of natural wetlands to facilitate human development, and the construction over many years of a haphazard, crazy-quilt system of levees, dikes and dams have forever negatively altered the fragile interplay of sun, wind and ocean that make up the coast. Like watching a terminal cancer patient lose their battle with the disease, the death of the Louisiana coast is a supremely painful and unparalleled tragedy for America, made all the worse by the slow, inexorable and deliberate pace of its demise.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Summertime, and the Livin' is Crazy
As we start our long, slow descent into Hades, otherwise known as summertime around here, we begin to feel the fear and loathing as we anticipate the inevitable 110-plus-degree days sure to come. This discomfort is made a tad bit worse due to the craziness which still envelops us like a sweltering, humid monsoon afternoon.
The blowback from the passage of SB 1070 continues unabated and even the Gulf oil spill can't knock it out of the top news story position. For anyone who's been living in a cave, SB 1070 is the new, get-tough illegal immigration law recently passed by our fair state. I was all ready to jump on the liberal bandwagon and condemn this law as racist and unconstitutional, but when some of its opponents catagorized it as "un-Christian," well, they lost me. Since when do our laws have a Christian aspect to them? Like we have to get the Catholic Church to approve them before passage? This is just one more of the annoying and vexing instances of the church-state separation being breached as part of some group's agenda.
Also on this topic, our lovely governor-without-a-mandate Jan Brewer is trying to counter the anti-SB 1070 furor and push back on all the boycotts and economic backlash that have been directed at us by holding a press conference and dredging up that chirpy, detestable Sarah Palin to come in and talk to us about something or other. The second I saw that pinhead's face and heard her fingernails-on-a-blackboard voice I changed the channel, but you know things are going to hell whenever you have to trot out an ignorant, inbred hillbilly to make a point. Brewer has also been taking to the airwaves in support of Proposition 100, which would add 1% to our state sales tax, ostensibly for education and public services. I am so against any new taxes because I feel I pay my share and so much of our money is wasted on stupid nonsense, but I would definitely be in favor of kicking in a couple of bucks to get that woman a face lift. She always looks so horrible on the news, like she is over 200 years old. The phrase "rode hard and put away wet" fits her perfectly and her face truly does look like 100 miles of bumpy dirt road.
President Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court and everyone seems to agree (or can't find evidence to the contrary) that she is a pre-eminent legal scholar and would make a good Justice of the Court. But, in a development that is completely incomprehensible to me, some people are moaning about the fact that there will be no more Protestants on the Supreme Court, only Catholics and Jews. Is anyone actually serious about that? Why would the religious make-up of the Supreme Court matter to anyone? Again, to run the point into the ground, our government is not supposed to be about religion. The Founding Fathers made no provision for religious balance on the Supreme Court, and in fact if there is ANY arm of the government that needs to be free of religious influences, it should be the Supreme Court. Remember, there's this little something called "equal justice under law" that says our legal system should not, and CANNOT, take into account religious affiliation when interpreting the Constitution. If people are so wound up about some kind of religious "balance" in the highest court in the land, why are there no Buddhists, Muslims, Quakers or atheists on the court? Another of the really loathsome and distasteful incursions of religion into the lifeblood of our democracy, and it is very shameful and disgusting.
And, last but certainly not least, we have been subjected to a really obnoxious political ad by the eternally creepy Senator John McCain, an incumbent who is facing an uphill re-election campaign against opponent J. D. Hayworth this fall. Only this wretched state could come up with someone even more repellent and repulsive than McCain, but more on that in a future post. The television ads in question shows McCain doddering along the Arizona-Mexico border fence with Pinal County sheriff Paul Babeu, discussing the sorry state of illegal immigration and how we need to "complete the danged fence". Since when does the word "danged" enter into political discourse among adults? Babeu is wearing his full sheriff drag, but an amusing little disclaimer on the bottom of the screen quietly notes that he is "appearing only in his personal capacity." That means that despite wearing his uniform, we should ignore that fact that he is head of the Pinal County Sheriff's Office, wink wink nudge nudge, and is only granting us the benefit of his own personal opinions. Then why isn't he wearing civilian clothes? Maybe because no one would give a crap if they thought he was just a civilian expressing his own views, but do pay attention if they think he's a law enforcement officer. I'm sure there are some legal prohibitions against a county sheriff using the power of his office to endorse a candidate, and this is the McCain committee's underhanded, cynical way of getting around that. And the very saddest part of this is that it will work with a number of voters who are too gullible and dimwitted to realize they are being played.
So, life here continues to swirl around the toilet bowl and each passing day brings a new load of baffling, confusing and demoralizing examples of people being stupid morons. It is really going to be a long, hot, depressing summer.
The blowback from the passage of SB 1070 continues unabated and even the Gulf oil spill can't knock it out of the top news story position. For anyone who's been living in a cave, SB 1070 is the new, get-tough illegal immigration law recently passed by our fair state. I was all ready to jump on the liberal bandwagon and condemn this law as racist and unconstitutional, but when some of its opponents catagorized it as "un-Christian," well, they lost me. Since when do our laws have a Christian aspect to them? Like we have to get the Catholic Church to approve them before passage? This is just one more of the annoying and vexing instances of the church-state separation being breached as part of some group's agenda.
Also on this topic, our lovely governor-without-a-mandate Jan Brewer is trying to counter the anti-SB 1070 furor and push back on all the boycotts and economic backlash that have been directed at us by holding a press conference and dredging up that chirpy, detestable Sarah Palin to come in and talk to us about something or other. The second I saw that pinhead's face and heard her fingernails-on-a-blackboard voice I changed the channel, but you know things are going to hell whenever you have to trot out an ignorant, inbred hillbilly to make a point. Brewer has also been taking to the airwaves in support of Proposition 100, which would add 1% to our state sales tax, ostensibly for education and public services. I am so against any new taxes because I feel I pay my share and so much of our money is wasted on stupid nonsense, but I would definitely be in favor of kicking in a couple of bucks to get that woman a face lift. She always looks so horrible on the news, like she is over 200 years old. The phrase "rode hard and put away wet" fits her perfectly and her face truly does look like 100 miles of bumpy dirt road.
President Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court and everyone seems to agree (or can't find evidence to the contrary) that she is a pre-eminent legal scholar and would make a good Justice of the Court. But, in a development that is completely incomprehensible to me, some people are moaning about the fact that there will be no more Protestants on the Supreme Court, only Catholics and Jews. Is anyone actually serious about that? Why would the religious make-up of the Supreme Court matter to anyone? Again, to run the point into the ground, our government is not supposed to be about religion. The Founding Fathers made no provision for religious balance on the Supreme Court, and in fact if there is ANY arm of the government that needs to be free of religious influences, it should be the Supreme Court. Remember, there's this little something called "equal justice under law" that says our legal system should not, and CANNOT, take into account religious affiliation when interpreting the Constitution. If people are so wound up about some kind of religious "balance" in the highest court in the land, why are there no Buddhists, Muslims, Quakers or atheists on the court? Another of the really loathsome and distasteful incursions of religion into the lifeblood of our democracy, and it is very shameful and disgusting.
And, last but certainly not least, we have been subjected to a really obnoxious political ad by the eternally creepy Senator John McCain, an incumbent who is facing an uphill re-election campaign against opponent J. D. Hayworth this fall. Only this wretched state could come up with someone even more repellent and repulsive than McCain, but more on that in a future post. The television ads in question shows McCain doddering along the Arizona-Mexico border fence with Pinal County sheriff Paul Babeu, discussing the sorry state of illegal immigration and how we need to "complete the danged fence". Since when does the word "danged" enter into political discourse among adults? Babeu is wearing his full sheriff drag, but an amusing little disclaimer on the bottom of the screen quietly notes that he is "appearing only in his personal capacity." That means that despite wearing his uniform, we should ignore that fact that he is head of the Pinal County Sheriff's Office, wink wink nudge nudge, and is only granting us the benefit of his own personal opinions. Then why isn't he wearing civilian clothes? Maybe because no one would give a crap if they thought he was just a civilian expressing his own views, but do pay attention if they think he's a law enforcement officer. I'm sure there are some legal prohibitions against a county sheriff using the power of his office to endorse a candidate, and this is the McCain committee's underhanded, cynical way of getting around that. And the very saddest part of this is that it will work with a number of voters who are too gullible and dimwitted to realize they are being played.
So, life here continues to swirl around the toilet bowl and each passing day brings a new load of baffling, confusing and demoralizing examples of people being stupid morons. It is really going to be a long, hot, depressing summer.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Roller-Coaster Ride From Hell
This has been some kind of week; it's like the cosmic floodgates of crazy opened wide and unleashed a deluge, nearly drowning us in bizarre behavior and really bad things. I know that Mercury is in one of its frequent, damnable retrogrades until May 13, and that usually means strangeness and perversity will prevail, but Mercury must be retrograding itself clean out of the Solar System because tons of weird shit have been happening all over.
Oh, speaking of "shit", we heard that word, or variations of it, echoing off the august alabaster walls of Congress as Senate hearings into the vile machinations of Wall Street raged on for five hours. The leaders of various financial firms got their buns raked over the coals by angry Senators, but they must have been wearing asbestos underwear because they didn't seem to be much phased by the whole ordeal. Maybe when you know you're making 50 million dollars this year you don't need to take some crotchety old man with a gavel seriously. I think that Wall Streeters know that their lobbying money has bought them protection from any meaningful reform, especially because the people trying to navigate the country out of the crippling, damaging recession are the very same people who caused it. So they don't have anything to worry about.
Very disturbing story about an environmental catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico as a British Petroleum oil rig spews over 200,000 gallons of crude oil a day into the rich seafood beds and delicate wetlands ecosystem off the Louisiana coast, a truly special and unique part of the world that can't seem to catch a break when it comes to natural disasters. I wonder where that shithead Sarah Palin is now - we don't seem to be hearing a lot from her on one of her favorite subjects, offshore drilling. Who can forget her childish, simplistic chant of "Drill, baby, drill" at last summer's Republican convention, and the sight of all those wrinkled, pinched faces of the dessicated old people madly cheering her on. If I could, I would ask her, "Hey Sarah, how's that drilly-spilly thing working for you?" We'll see how far offshore drilling goes now.
And we're having our own shitstorm here in Arizona, as the whole nation goes ape shit (yes, I'm going to use that word as much as I can, while I can). The local news shows babble on breathlessly about the economic "backlash" this bill will cause us. In sonorous tones they announce the conventions that are being canceled left and right. The first convention canceled was for some immigration lawyers' group, so that wasn't exactly a horrible shock. But hotel owners are already declaring Armageddon and claim to be teetering on the edge of ruin. Various big-city governments, most notably San Francisco, Dallas and New York, have cut business ties with our fair state. But we've seen this before - Arizona caught all kinds of crap when it refused to honor Martin Luther King. Despite all the dire predictions, over 60% of Arizonans approve of the new law and Governor-Without-A-Mandate Jan Brewer's approval rating has gone up around 15 percentage points. What does that say about us, that we somehow invite and look forward to economic ruin? I guess this little psychodrama has to play itself out and by next week everybody will have moved on to the next manufactured crisis, and life here will return to relative normalcy. People have very short memories, especially when it comes to disasters.
I hope we can get some rest this weekend and nothing awful happens for a couple of days, at least. It would be just our luck that some flashpoint in the world will pop off, like North Korea or Iran, and all of a sudden everybody's attention will go over there. Either that or some dimwitted Hollywood starlet will make another public appearance without panties or someone will uncover a nest of 50 new Tiger Woods mistresses or some shameless trollop will parade around in a bikini with Nazi tattoos on her butt. And everyone will be interested in that.
Mercury, give us a break and un-retrograde yourself. We can't stand much more of this cosmic craziness.
Oh, speaking of "shit", we heard that word, or variations of it, echoing off the august alabaster walls of Congress as Senate hearings into the vile machinations of Wall Street raged on for five hours. The leaders of various financial firms got their buns raked over the coals by angry Senators, but they must have been wearing asbestos underwear because they didn't seem to be much phased by the whole ordeal. Maybe when you know you're making 50 million dollars this year you don't need to take some crotchety old man with a gavel seriously. I think that Wall Streeters know that their lobbying money has bought them protection from any meaningful reform, especially because the people trying to navigate the country out of the crippling, damaging recession are the very same people who caused it. So they don't have anything to worry about.
Very disturbing story about an environmental catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico as a British Petroleum oil rig spews over 200,000 gallons of crude oil a day into the rich seafood beds and delicate wetlands ecosystem off the Louisiana coast, a truly special and unique part of the world that can't seem to catch a break when it comes to natural disasters. I wonder where that shithead Sarah Palin is now - we don't seem to be hearing a lot from her on one of her favorite subjects, offshore drilling. Who can forget her childish, simplistic chant of "Drill, baby, drill" at last summer's Republican convention, and the sight of all those wrinkled, pinched faces of the dessicated old people madly cheering her on. If I could, I would ask her, "Hey Sarah, how's that drilly-spilly thing working for you?" We'll see how far offshore drilling goes now.
And we're having our own shitstorm here in Arizona, as the whole nation goes ape shit (yes, I'm going to use that word as much as I can, while I can). The local news shows babble on breathlessly about the economic "backlash" this bill will cause us. In sonorous tones they announce the conventions that are being canceled left and right. The first convention canceled was for some immigration lawyers' group, so that wasn't exactly a horrible shock. But hotel owners are already declaring Armageddon and claim to be teetering on the edge of ruin. Various big-city governments, most notably San Francisco, Dallas and New York, have cut business ties with our fair state. But we've seen this before - Arizona caught all kinds of crap when it refused to honor Martin Luther King. Despite all the dire predictions, over 60% of Arizonans approve of the new law and Governor-Without-A-Mandate Jan Brewer's approval rating has gone up around 15 percentage points. What does that say about us, that we somehow invite and look forward to economic ruin? I guess this little psychodrama has to play itself out and by next week everybody will have moved on to the next manufactured crisis, and life here will return to relative normalcy. People have very short memories, especially when it comes to disasters.
I hope we can get some rest this weekend and nothing awful happens for a couple of days, at least. It would be just our luck that some flashpoint in the world will pop off, like North Korea or Iran, and all of a sudden everybody's attention will go over there. Either that or some dimwitted Hollywood starlet will make another public appearance without panties or someone will uncover a nest of 50 new Tiger Woods mistresses or some shameless trollop will parade around in a bikini with Nazi tattoos on her butt. And everyone will be interested in that.
Mercury, give us a break and un-retrograde yourself. We can't stand much more of this cosmic craziness.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
This Doesn't Look Good
In case you had somewhat of a bumpy ride in your life the past couple of weeks, some people think it was due to the planet Mercury going through a retrograde. A retrograde is when a planet appears to reverse the direction of its movement through the sky as seen from earth for a short period of time. Normally planets move in a west-to-east direction but due to their differing orbital speeds around the sun, and the fact that our earth is moving around the sun in its own orbit too, sometimes things line up so that it looks like a planet is doing a small loop-de-loop in the sky. This does not happen immediately but over a couple of weeks or months, depending on the planet.
(Click on the above picture to view a larger version)
Astrologers tell us that bad things happen during Mercury retrogrades. The good thing about these retrogrades is they only last a couple of weeks at a time. The bad thing is that that happen fairly often, usually every 3-5 months because Mercury zips around the sun every 88 Earth days. Whether the bad karma of a Mercury retrograde is true or not is debatable, but let's take these things at face value and rejoice in the fact that the latest retrograde ended yesterday, September 29th. Don't get too comfortable because the next retrograde starts the day after Christmas and goes to January 15, 2010.
But whoever is running the Great Karmic Universal Drama that is our lives decided to throw in a whole bunch of bad stuff right at the end of the retrograde. This is some of the stuff we have to deal with, now and in the future, in no particular order:
1) Nuclear Iran - The revelation that Iran has built a secret underground lab in the mountains in the middle of a military base camp - quite the unusual site for what they claim is a commercial power-generation station - is very bad news for an area of the world already critically unstable. One slip-up anywhere and oil gets shut off to the world, immediately scuttling whatever kind of tepid economic recovery we're seeing. That, coupled with Iran's missile capabilities and the completely batshit-crazy Ahmadinejad, who looks like a homeless person who has been huffing paint thinner for 20 years, does not auger well for anyone who has even a passing interest in living on this planet.
2) Earthquake/Tsunami - People always love to blame seismic activity on astrological alignments, and the end of the retrograde gave them a great chance to write off the tsunami that hit American Samoa and the monster quake in western Indonesia yesterday as more evidence that the gods are angry with us. I'm not so sure, because sometimes things just happen in the same time-frame and don't have a causal relationship. That brings up the old adage of there are no coincidences in the universe, stuff always happens for a reason. Maybe they do and maybe they don't, I don't know.
3) Butt bombs - Terrorists have come up with a new, fiendishly effective and wildly bizarre way to blow up people. They have taken to inserting explosives in their rectums along with a detonator that operates like a cell phone. The bomb can be triggered remotely by texting something to it. Recently a terrorist with an implanted bomb got past extremely tight security and nearly assassinated a Saudi prince. Security experts worldwide are fretting that such a bomb is pretty much undetectable by current security measures, and that alone should give everyone pause. Such an explosion in an airliner at 36000 feet would be catastrophic. This is an extremely unsettling and dangerous escalation in the war on terror.
4) Double-dip recession - Economists have been cautiously optimistic that things have been turning in a better direction recently, and we may officially be out of the recession and heading toward positive economic growth. But before we break out the Andre champagne and the Dixie cups, we need to remember that this "recovery" appears to be weak and fragile, and easily reversible. Lots of people don't have jobs and are afraid to spend money, and if people don't start buying stuff companies will not start to create jobs, and around and around it goes. The big fear is that this will be a jobless, double-dip recession, in which the economy will appear to start to recover but then crash again and hit another bottom, before limping back to another weak recovery. Economists put the odds of such a double-dip at 50/50. It looks like we will be dealing with the bad effects of a very sick economy for a long, long time.
Well, there you have it, your entire ration of depressing news in one place, you can thank me later. If you can stand it, throw in the stuff we've been dealing with for a much longer time, such as global warming, environmental degradation, an interminable, rancorous heath care debacle, the looming H1N1 virus season coming soon and the future bankrupting of Social Security and Medicare, and we have a whole plateful of nasty, unpleasant events to contend with. It seems as if this current decade has been one of very drastic, permanent, negative change. Starting with the 9/11 attacks and continuing through the collapse of the U.S. economy and the recession, things in our lives are changing at warp speed, and definitely not for the better.
(Click on the above picture to view a larger version)
Astrologers tell us that bad things happen during Mercury retrogrades. The good thing about these retrogrades is they only last a couple of weeks at a time. The bad thing is that that happen fairly often, usually every 3-5 months because Mercury zips around the sun every 88 Earth days. Whether the bad karma of a Mercury retrograde is true or not is debatable, but let's take these things at face value and rejoice in the fact that the latest retrograde ended yesterday, September 29th. Don't get too comfortable because the next retrograde starts the day after Christmas and goes to January 15, 2010.
But whoever is running the Great Karmic Universal Drama that is our lives decided to throw in a whole bunch of bad stuff right at the end of the retrograde. This is some of the stuff we have to deal with, now and in the future, in no particular order:
1) Nuclear Iran - The revelation that Iran has built a secret underground lab in the mountains in the middle of a military base camp - quite the unusual site for what they claim is a commercial power-generation station - is very bad news for an area of the world already critically unstable. One slip-up anywhere and oil gets shut off to the world, immediately scuttling whatever kind of tepid economic recovery we're seeing. That, coupled with Iran's missile capabilities and the completely batshit-crazy Ahmadinejad, who looks like a homeless person who has been huffing paint thinner for 20 years, does not auger well for anyone who has even a passing interest in living on this planet.
2) Earthquake/Tsunami - People always love to blame seismic activity on astrological alignments, and the end of the retrograde gave them a great chance to write off the tsunami that hit American Samoa and the monster quake in western Indonesia yesterday as more evidence that the gods are angry with us. I'm not so sure, because sometimes things just happen in the same time-frame and don't have a causal relationship. That brings up the old adage of there are no coincidences in the universe, stuff always happens for a reason. Maybe they do and maybe they don't, I don't know.
3) Butt bombs - Terrorists have come up with a new, fiendishly effective and wildly bizarre way to blow up people. They have taken to inserting explosives in their rectums along with a detonator that operates like a cell phone. The bomb can be triggered remotely by texting something to it. Recently a terrorist with an implanted bomb got past extremely tight security and nearly assassinated a Saudi prince. Security experts worldwide are fretting that such a bomb is pretty much undetectable by current security measures, and that alone should give everyone pause. Such an explosion in an airliner at 36000 feet would be catastrophic. This is an extremely unsettling and dangerous escalation in the war on terror.
4) Double-dip recession - Economists have been cautiously optimistic that things have been turning in a better direction recently, and we may officially be out of the recession and heading toward positive economic growth. But before we break out the Andre champagne and the Dixie cups, we need to remember that this "recovery" appears to be weak and fragile, and easily reversible. Lots of people don't have jobs and are afraid to spend money, and if people don't start buying stuff companies will not start to create jobs, and around and around it goes. The big fear is that this will be a jobless, double-dip recession, in which the economy will appear to start to recover but then crash again and hit another bottom, before limping back to another weak recovery. Economists put the odds of such a double-dip at 50/50. It looks like we will be dealing with the bad effects of a very sick economy for a long, long time.
Well, there you have it, your entire ration of depressing news in one place, you can thank me later. If you can stand it, throw in the stuff we've been dealing with for a much longer time, such as global warming, environmental degradation, an interminable, rancorous heath care debacle, the looming H1N1 virus season coming soon and the future bankrupting of Social Security and Medicare, and we have a whole plateful of nasty, unpleasant events to contend with. It seems as if this current decade has been one of very drastic, permanent, negative change. Starting with the 9/11 attacks and continuing through the collapse of the U.S. economy and the recession, things in our lives are changing at warp speed, and definitely not for the better.
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