Scientists who study life on Earth have something in common with scientists who study the climate of Earth. Besides being scientists, that is.

Practically all life scientists accept that life on Earth initially evolved from non-living materials billions of years ago, and has continued to evolve via natural selection – as initially proposed by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in 1859, and as supported and enhanced since by long catalogues of facts.

About half of the rest of We the People reject evolution.

Practically all climate scientists accept that the Earth’s atmospheric temperature is rising and that human-generated carbon dioxide is a primary cause of that rise – as initially proposed by Roger Revelle and Hans Suess in 1957, and as supported and enhanced since by long catalogues of facts.

About half of the rest of We the People reject anthropogenic global warming.

Both life and climate scientists deal with “arguments”, usually endlessly-iterated catchphrases, that are inaccessible to logic. As Richard Dawkins relates in The God Delusion, a person once heard Dawkins out and then told him, ‘Your argument is compelling, but I don’t believe it.’

Both life and climate scientists deal with ad hominem attacks that seek to discredit their work by assassinating their characters. As if the alleged indiscretions of golfer Tiger Woods somehow erase the scores Woods posted in winning, to date, 14 major championships. (That earthquake was the flamboyant, and less than discrete, golf legend Walter Hagen rolling over in his grave, laughing hysterically over the Woods furore.)

Both life and climate scientists face these challenges, in part, because, as Jeff Masters (yes, Mom, him again) so eloquently puts it in the latest entry to his “Manufactured Doubt” blog series, they “are honest, incredibly hard-working … servants who are enduring a punishing assault on their integrity because they are the bearers of bad news (emphasis added)”.

Bad news to the religions, especially Christian religions, because the findings of the life scientists place at risk the operations of the self-appointed keepers of our spiritual well-being.

Bad news to the fossil fuel industries, because the findings of the climate scientists place at risk the operations of the self-appointed keepers of our material well-being.

Both the religions and the fossil fuel industries have fought back. By proclamation of dogma (of, literally, the “Good News” in the case of Christianity) or manufacturing of doubt. And, most importantly, by means of emotional appeals. A cross moves more hearts than a dissertation. A Hummer is a whole lot sexier, and easier to grasp, than a long catalogue of facts. And it may even cost less.

Both the religions and the fossil fuel industries pay people, often handsomely, who are trained in the techniques of manipulating feelings. Precisely what the scientist is trained to abhor. It is obviously money well spent … for half of We the People are supporting the hypothesis that an ounce of emo is worth a pound – nay, a ton – of data.

And therefore – because the very people who profit most from your agreement to this statement say so – neither evolution nor global warming exist.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

You’ve probably heard this news already.

But just in case you haven’t, here it is. Representatives of 192 nations are meeting in Hopenhagen … er, Copenhagen … this coming Monday (7 December 2009) to hammer out the terms of an international agreement, supplanting the Kyoto Protocol, to limit the world’s production of substances (carbon dioxide, to name one) linked to anthropogenic global warming (AGW, to use the alphabet-soup term).

As the pun implies, this meeting bears the burden of the wishful thinking of a whole lot of people. People who think that the meeting’s outcome will allow Us to continue more or less as we are, just with a whole pack of new machines.

People who fail to realize that it was machines, together with penicillin, that got us into this global warming mess in the first place.

But never mind the laws of thermodynamics. The folk in Copenhagen are representatives of the same politicians that We elected to fix the economy. The ones responsible for your unemployment benefits expiring, or terminating because of a (quote) computer glitch (unquote). The unemployment benefits that you won’t be using to buy any of those fancy new machines. How much can we really expect from these folk?

But never mind that either.

I just wish they’d chosen a different day for the meeting.

Yes. The Copenhagen meeting starts on the 68th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, here in Hawai‘i.

So what happens if the Copenhagen Protocol actually does what is necessary to limit the progression of, and damage from, AGW? What if it does even a tenth of what is necessary?

What will be the response of the fossil fuel industry?

Keep in mind that the fossil fuel industry is already funding what’s been styled “the most vigorous and well-funded disinformation campaign against science ever conducted“. Including personal attacks on scientists based on stolen communications taken out of context.

If that’s what we’re getting now, what if the politicians start agreeing with the scientists? What less is on tap but all-out war? By the industry, and the shareholders in that industry, and the beneficiaries …

And in such a war, what side will all those Hopenhagen petition signers be taking? Remember, for the world to go back to the energy (measured as trash) levels of 1960, each of Us has to use one third less than we’re using today. And that’s not good enough to significantly derail AGW. Translation: park your car and throw away the keys. You won’t be using it. Thought I as I was stuck in Honolulu traffic on a typical Saturday morning.

I think you know which side the petitioners will be on as well as I do.

Hopenhagen doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have a habit of looking at issues that We the People blame on Them (you know who “They” are) and suggesting that “They” are the ones that you – and I – shave with every morning.

That’s probably how come there are so few of you regular readers. And there will probably be even fewer of you after this post. But I’ll risk it. Because Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground website (I’ve mentioned him here before) has written, I think, the second most important bit of Internet information on human interaction with planet Earth that there is.

(This is number 1. It’s a video series, it’s long, and it’s a fairly standard university-style lecture without fancy bells or whistles. But watch it, all eight parts, and pay attention. It’s every bit as true today as when it was first presented, a decade ago. Do not view the comments unless you have a hard head and a strong stomach – they are prima facie evidence that our species deserves nothing more than to go straight to Hell, without passing “Go”, without collecting $200.)

Masters writes, in his blog entry, which is about equal parts book review and his own distilled scientific judgment, about “manufactured doubt” – the industry that spreads disinformation about scientific evidence, when that evidence threatens the profitability of corporations whose products put humanity at risk. He documents the role that the “manufactured doubt” industry played in delaying or derailing efforts to limit the damage created by tobacco products, asbestos, and various toxic industrial chemicals including the chlorofluorocarbons responsible for the destruction of atmospheric ozone.

And, most recently, its attempts to safeguard the profits of the fossil fuel industries by debunking the evidence for anthropogenic global warming.

Masters gives details about the “bag of tricks” that the practitioners of “manufactured doubt” use to achieve their ends. Including the disparaging of peer-reviewed science and, at both the professional and personal levels, of the scientists who produce that science – impugning, among other things, that the scientists are “just another bunch of hired guns” whose findings are for sale to the highest bidder.

A disparaging that’s easy for the “manufactured doubters” and their corporate sponsors to do, since so many people with scientific credentials (some fairly substantial) are prepared to be just this type of hired gun. But what else to expect, Jerry, when jobs in, and funds for, non-corporate research are so scarce (thanks in part to these very same “manufactured doubt” campaigns), and the opportunities for selling out are so lucrative, amounting to a doubling or even more of the standard academic salary?

Now, all this reads like a diatribe against corporate moguls, doesn’t it? But then, Masters flashes the mirror. He states:

I believe that for the most part, the corporations involved have little choice under the law but to protect their profits by pursuing Manufactured Doubt campaigns … The law makes a company’s board of directors legally liable for “breach of fiduciary responsibility” if they knowingly manage a company in a way that reduces profits. Shareholders can and have sued companies for being overly socially responsible …

He cites the sad case of Henry Ford, who:

… was successfully sued by stockholders in 1919 for raising the minimum wage of his workers to $5 per day. The courts declared that, while Ford’s humanitarian sentiments about his employees were nice, his business existed to make profits for its stockholders (emphasis added).

This, dear readers, is not the revelation of a global corporate-mogul conspiracy against the “common man”. Much as those who see their own profit opportunities in such rabble-rousing would have you think otherwise.

This is your 401k telling the corporate moguls what they must do.

Masters did not end his post with any cosmic conclusions. He is, after all, a scientist, and as a scientist (rather than a propagandist such as are the “manufactured doubt” generators), he offers conclusions cautiously, and only those supported by evidence, as much and as rigorously-tested as is to hand at the time of writing. Besides, Masters has a large blog, and probably is wary of doing any more damage to his readership – and his company – than a post of this sort risks already.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba, on the other hand, has a small blog, and therefore little to risk. So I write what my conclusion is, on the basis of this evidence – and take some comfort that the message is the same as the one that scientist and science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov set down in his Bathroom Law:

The goal of preserving a planet suitable for human habitation, and the goal of preserving the individual liberty of humans living on this planet, are incompossible.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

I had escaped my university office/lab for a breath of fresh air, and was walking through McCarthy Mall, when I saw, on the normally-barren walls of a vending kiosk, a small, photocopied poster.

Sign the Petition!

“Gasp!“, I gasped. “Student activism!” I could hardly believe my eyes; I had thought the species to be extinct in Hawai‘i. I scanned the poster for the cause. Global warming? Corporate bailouts? Afghanistan? The slashing of education budgets?

SAVE THE TREE!

Right. An impassioned outpouring, complete with website, on behalf of a single misshapen pile of live haole lumber that can’t even be used for bird perches. Standing next to a termite mound prefab building of ancient vintage (euphemistically called an “annex”, and housing … well, the university’s so ashamed of it, I can’t find out which academic unit they’ve stuck in there), which, I reckon, the tree is tearing up by the roots. Literally.

Yes, the tree’s old. So old, in fact, that it was planted just about at the time when the haoles of Hawai‘i decided that the native government of Hawai‘i wasn’t good enough for them. Planted by a haole professor of botany who figured that the native flora wasn’t good enough for them either. (Funny how nobody has mentioned this.)

And it’s this history that makes this tree worth saving until it topples of its own weight (perhaps mercifully taking that annex along with it), rather than chopping it down to make way for the planned recreation center …

The what?!?

Academic department budgets in this year of woe have been slashed by 30%. Academic buildings have been condemned and then quietly reoccupied – until they threatened to collapse. Academic programs have lost teaching staff and course offerings, in the face of record-high student enrollments – and the entire institution faces the prospect of early shutdown (lockout) unless faculty accept wage cuts that will forever dissuade any economically-knowledgeable American from undertaking a career in academia, while the rest of the world aggressively sponsors its intelligentsia.

And this institution is building a recreation center? What is this, a university or a spa?

And the strongest response to this revelation, by the student body, is a one-man campaign to save a tree?!?

Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba never thought he’d see the day when he’d say, in public, “I miss the sixties.” The turbulent, not to mention violent, sixties, when the issues of the day, some of them less momentous than those now confronting university communities, led to debates and demonstrations, arguments and protests, even bricks and tear gas. There was strife and disillusion, and not all motives were selfless. But the world did change.

Now?

A university is on the brink of collapse, and a lone voice in the wilderness posts pieces of paper in a feeble effort to preserve a tottering fig. Surely we can do better …

I have it. We’ll get somebody to sucker the Obama Administration into reinstating the draft …

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

DISCLAIMER: A work of fiction. Resemblances to living persons, or extant organizations, are for satirical purposes, or are coincidental.

=================

The threat level, as determined by the Department of Homeland Security, is orange. Please report all suspicious activity to airport personnel immediately.

“Doesn’t that blasted recording ever wear out?”

“It’s digital, Damitri. You’d wear out faster, if I took you off the scanning team and put you on announcements. Trust me on this.”

“Oh. Hi, Jack.”

“No jokes, damn you. You’re in uniform, and we’ve got to keep these airline passengers in line.”

“Seventeen rows deep and out the front door, as usual.”

“Right. That does it. Soon as this shift is over, I’m changing my name to Sigmund.”

“Good choice, Jack. Has a nice ring to it. Sigmund. Sigmund Fraud!“

“That’s Freud, Damitri.”

“I know what I said, dammit. How many years has that ‘orange alert’ been up, huh? Four years straight? Five? Six?? We got enough jackknives in the box to bankrupt the Swiss, enough toothpaste to put Procter & Gamble out of business. How much more shakedown do we need?!?“

“Enough to get the body scanners in place.”

“The body scanners?”

“Didn’t you get that memo? Look here. With these things, passengers won’t have to spend half their lives in the scanning queue stripping, and the other half putting it all back together again. They’ll just walk through this gate, and we’ll see everything. And, heh heh, I do mean everything. We’ll get plenty of material for the flesh rags, and they’re buyin’.”

“Not with pictures like that, they won’t be. Resolution’s terrible.”

“Since when have we reported all of what we know about our equipment? They want better pictures, we can deliver. And you’d be surprised, Damitri, at just how many folks have placed orders for the lower quality stuff already. This is big money just waiting to fall into our laps.”

“I dunno, Jack …”

“Damitri, you’re a good man, and we can’t afford to lose you. Tell you what. Take some vacation. Two weeks starting tomorrow. I’ll make it good with HR. Find a nice quiet spot, bring the family. The organization will cover the costs. Come back rested and refreshed and ready to Protect and Serve.”

“Protect our profits and Serve ourselves. OK, Jack. But I gotta tell you, I’m far from being the only one in the line asking questions. Angel, for instance. He was one of the first, before he vanished. What happened to him, anyway?”

“He waited too long to take his vacation. Don’t you make the same mistake.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year 1918 of the Common Era (there having been precious little evidence of the presence of “Our Lord” in the muddy trenches of western Europe), the shooting stopped in Flanders fields, bringing an end to the First World War.

The War To End All Wars, Adolph.

It rearranged empires. It begot massive personal and national fortunes and then callously broke them on the anvils of hyperinflation and economic depression. It dropped men and women (25 out of every 100 or even more) on bread lines, and bred demagogues, Mr. Limbaugh, to feed them on a diet of anger.

And in a mere 21 years, the shooting started again. A war thought so horrific that no sane person would ever risk war again, a war that blasted millions of lives in mere days, led to another that blasted millions of lives in mere seconds. Despite which, no one proclaimed at its end that “now we have seen the worst.”

Some historians, I understand, argue that what we call the First World War ended, not in 1918, but (maybe) in 1989, with the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the empire that constructed it. When the focus of war changed, from the grapplings of European titans to the efforts to bring down the last titan standing by pecking at it and watching it slap itself silly.

A quarter of a million Iraqis, or rather their loved ones, regret being in the path of the flying elbows.

On this Veterans Day, I have not seen any poppies. There used to be poppies, handed out by men in uniform in remembrance of those who lie under the poppies of Belgium, in their own personal trenches in Flanders fields.

Perhaps We the People have read the poem, and are resisting the lemming call to enlist, to follow the dead into the carnage, into the wastage of persons and treasure that is war.

Or perhaps it’s just too much of a nuisance to have to deal with a gnarled old soldier who’s working the mall when you want to go shopping.

After all, Christmas is coming.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

As Quilly has already pointed out, there’s currently (5 November 2009) a “blogblast for peace” going on. A relict from the days when Baby Boomers were young, and everything could be solved by carrying picket signs and burning scrap paper draft cards.

Quilly’s take is that peace among humans is impossible unless everybody is truly created – and kept – equal in the materials of life (food, clothing, shelter, luxuries like transportation beyond foot power). To which she expects the response, ‘Ridiculous! Impossible!’ Well, it may or may not be ridiculous, but it most certainly is impossible. Because if we tried it, we’d probably all starve …

This post is excerpted from an earlier one presented on the late Felloffatruck Publications blog on 7 May 2006.

=================

Yes, you heard me. It bothers me, all this peace talk. I’m a scientist. I study biology. The interactions among creatures, and the history of those interactions. Evolution, if you’ll permit me. And those studies tell me that if we think we can get and keep peace just by praying about it, or by carrying around a pack of banners or bumper stickers, then we don’t know Jack.

Charles Darwin – yes, that Darwin – saw that all living things are in competition with each other for the necessities of life: food, water, shelter, mates. He saw plainly that, in most cases, the necessities are scarce. There ain’t enough to go around, and the individuals who can’t successfully compete for them will perish.

This idea wasn’t original with Darwin. Thomas Malthus saw it in human populations a generation previously – though he interpreted his observations in terms of “divine wisdom”.

What’s more, all the good farmers saw it. And they showed Darwin. In every crop of cattle, or sheep, or corn, or even pigeons, there were some who were fatter, or grew faster, or were prettier. These individuals were kept, and allowed to breed. All the others went to the dinner table, or if they were inedible, they were burned. Not enough feed, or land, or space to keep all the less desirable offspring along with the more desirable ones.

It really wasn’t much of a jump for Darwin to make, from artificial selection, where humans drive the evolution of species by choosing those individuals who will be granted access to scarce resources, to natural selection, where it’s the combination of all the “forces of nature” that does the choosing.

So resources are scarce, and you wish to keep people from fighting over them. You wish for peace. What can you do? There are really only two choices. You can make more resources, or you can learn to share what resources there are.

The world has spent the entire last half-century trying, with some success, to make the pot bigger – and in this effort, the United States has taken the lead. It is the impulse that has driven the green revolution in agriculture – up to and including “frankenfood”. Our leadership in the green revolution, I think, played a major role in keeping We the People in good standing with the rest of the world despite our greedy sucking up of most of the new resources we were generating. At least, it did until 2003.

But there are problems.

First, the pot stretching is entirely dependent on stored energy: the fossil fuels, which not only power our machines but also provide the parts and lubricants for them and the fertilizers for the crops. The revolution will last only as long as the oil does.

Second, it is a paradigm of biology that, when the resources available to a species increase, the population of that species will increase to use and abuse them. Humans are different – but only because the human population has increased since 1950 at a rate greater than that thought possible for a species on Earth. You think people are going hungry now? Let there be a major glitch in the infrastructure enabling the global food economy, and the Katrina disaster will seem like the last flowering of Paradise.

Oh – and dare I mention all the contributions that the “green revolution” is making to anthropogenic global warming?

So, let’s try sharing. Um, let’s see. The wholesale price of gasoline has tripled since April of 2005. There has been, so far as I can tell, no measurable curtailment of American driving habits, even during the worst of the recent financial meltdown. And it’s universally recognized that any politician who suggests such a curtailment may as well apply to flip hamburgers at Mickey D’s. We the People are not interested in sharing. Please don’t try to tell me otherwise.

In fact, I’ll have to ask your forgiveness if an SUV with a Peace bumper sticker goes by, and you see me laugh, or cry, or flip the bird, depending on my mood of the moment. Because I see a phony. Worse, I see a phony using a guilt trip to protect the status quo. To keep the “have nots” in their places. “No war allowed; you will keep your hands off my stuff”. Can you say “elitist”? Can you say “arrogance”?

================

In her post, Quilly objected to a “Blogger for Peace” who quoted the opinion, the object of war is peace. Not only do I agree with Quilly’s objection, I venture to take it one step further – and in so doing, I claim the authority of Ambrose Bierce (see “War”), who, in turn, cited the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Peace (of the style called for by comfortable middle-class bloggers) is war.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2006, 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of its characters to persons living or dead is for satirical purposes, or is coincidental. Apologies to Jean-Paul Sartre.

===================================

Alan Baldwin: “OK, so where’s the torturer?”

Seizen Shigeta: “Shut up! You bring him in here, I’ll wring your neck.”

Kimo Kalakaua (to Shigeta): “Be still, brah. You forget where we stay?”

Shigeta: “A locked room in hell. In this heat, how could I forget?“

Kalakaua: “So you wring da haole’s neck. Where he wen go?“

Baldwin: “I never dreamed that hell would be a room in a huge Waikiki hotel, but one without even a city view. I suppose that minor amenities like toilets and bar fridges are superfluous in our condition, and A/C is too much to hope for.”

Kalakaua (to Baldwin): “What fo you stay dis place?”

Baldwin: “Damned if I … oh, shit. You?”

Kalakaua: “Dunno.”

Shigeta: “Me either. One minute, I’m leading a crucial meeting of the Hawai‘i Teachers Association, and the next …”

Kalakaua: “You one teacher union guy den!”

Shigeta: “Yeah …?”

Kalakaua: “You how come my keiki no can read!“

Shigeta: “Well, maybe if you parents actually sent us kids who were ready to learn to read, instead of spending all of their time disrupting classroom order …”

Kalakaua: “But that your job, to teach, not to be bumboss! An not fo go surf Wednesdays, neither. Teach is fo why we pay you da big bucks!“

Shigeta: “Big bucks?!? Hell made you lolo already? What’re you calling ‘big bucks’?”

Kalakaua: “You no stay in tent in Nanakuli, you make da big bucks.”

Shigeta: “Well, maybe if you people would get off the damned ice, you could get out of those tents. For your information, brah, teachers make less than just about any other field that requires a bachelor’s degree for entry. In Hawai‘i, teachers make maybe half of what they make anywhere else, when you factor in the cost of living on this rockpile. And that was before the damned furloughs. Teachers are hard to get. And if we didn’t have these little perks here and there for our members, and protect them against the likes of you, we wouldn’t have the teachers we have now!“

Baldwin (to Shigeta): “Do those ‘little perks’ include the bloated teaching bureaucracy?“

Shigeta: “Look, none of us asked to have reams of paperwork jammed down our throats! If we gotta have it, then we gotta have someone to do it!”

Baldwin: “Maybe if you did your jobs right, we wouldn’t have to have those reams of data to keep tabs on you.”

Shigeta: “And maybe if we had some resources with which to do our jobs, instead of trying to teach classes in science with chewing gum and baling wire, we’d have a chance to do those jobs and get out from under the paper pile!”

Baldwin: “And just where do you think we’re going to get those resources?”

Shigeta: “Taxes, of course.”

Baldwin: “‘Taxes, of course’. Get in line! You and everyone else on these bumps in the middle of the Pacific. Who’s going to pay them? The tax burden’s already sky-high. Between high taxes, high prices, and strangling regulations, just about every business in this state has gone broke except tourism, and the tourists are sick of getting gouged.”

Shigeta: “And how do you know this, haole? You a Baldwin, or something?”

Baldwin: “As a matter of fact …”

Kalakaua: “A Big Five bumboss?!?”

Shigeta: “Running working people into the ground for the sake of your swollen profits?!? How’s your buddy Bernie Madoff doing?”

Baldwin: “Listen up, commie. Like it or not, profits are what make it possible for society to pay teachers to surf on Wednesdays. If businesses aren’t allowed to make the kinds of money that will keep both their executives and their stockholders happy, they’re going to move or fold. And when they do, there won’t be anything left in Hawai‘i but coconuts and government. And you don’t want the government running things.”

Shigeta: “Damned right. All they do is tie us up with rules and threaten to fire us if we don’t dance to their tune.”

Kalakaua: “Government don’t do nothin’ fo us ‘cept rip up our tents and throw us in shelters. An it no even is ours!“

Baldwin: “And it taxes us to death for nothing! How come we don’t have anyone from government in here?”

Valet: (opening door) “None of them are in this hotel. The Adversary – the one you call (ptui) God – took one look at how they had to try to meet the mutually-impossible demands of the people they were supposed to govern, and decided they’d had their hell on earth. So they’re in that other place.

“Speaking of demands. The other cells are sick and tired of your bickering. If you don’t shut up and learn to get along, all hell’s going to break loose in here. Your only warning.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba was engaged in world-saving pursuits (reading the sports scores online) when he happened upon this headline:

Doctors May ‘Fire’ Parents Who Don’t Vaccinate Children

Seems there’s a profit-making newsworthy standoff between patients who are convinced that vaccinations cause autism in children and physicians who:

(a) are convinced that they don’t;

(b) don’t want to get blamed (read sued) for outbreaks of the deadly diseases that currently are controlled by universal vaccination programs.

Vaccinations have been taking shots ever since they were invented in the mid-19th century, but especially since the first Gulf War, when an anthrax vaccine was blamed (wrongly) for causing the puzzling array of illnesses labeled “Gulf War Syndrome”.

But what drove me to the keyboard was a line in a Discover magazine article that I looked up to track those developments in the vaccine controversy that were important to the press.

A line that asked, in effect, how it could be that “science and so many citizens fell out of touch” on the vaccination issue.

Indeed, how is that large numbers of people will choose to believe the opinions of a Playboy bunny over a physician’s recommendation based on reams of heavily scrutinized data? Or those of a political vaudevillian over the long catalogs of facts supporting evolution and anthropogenic global warming?

Lots of people have expressed opinions on this phenomenon, and how to fix it. My views are perhaps more curmudgeonly than some.

1. Science is hard. Yes it is. There’s no point in sugarcoating this, as some folk try to do. Success in science requires both a vivid imagination and the disciplined reasoning skills to turn that imagination into useful work. The earlier that someone begins learning and exercising these skills, the greater the chances for success.

We don’t seem to have any difficulties applying this principle to kindergarten students who show promise in football.

But if that kid shows promise in science?

We slap a white coat on him and call him ‘mad’.

And the science teachers compete with the music, art, and history teachers for space at the bake sale tables, in the dwindling hope that the schools for which they work (for now) might teach something other than football.

2. Science does not pay. Science as a profession is almost entirely a creation of the 20th century. The “great men” of the 19th century upon whom most modern science is based (e.g. Banks, Darwin, Freud, Lyell, Maxwell, etc.) hardly ever got a government grant, never ran a bake sale. They paid for their researches out of their own pockets, either from independent wealth or from “real job” income, such as from medicine or the law. This history, I think, is one of the reasons why pay rates for most scientists are so low. Hell, We the People haven’t had to pay for science before, why should we now?

And why should a young person with talent in science go through all the trouble to learn the hard discipline that science requires, and suffer all the ‘mad scientist’ jibes, only to make less than most of his peers who have taken easier and less costly paths in life?

3. Science has lost its reputation for impartiality.

Perhaps the most important of the hard-learned (and hard to learn) principles of science is that the work of a scientist is to be openly published and just as openly critiqued. The scientist is trained, not to argue that a piece of work is correct, but to argue, with the coldest and most rigorous logic at her command, that a piece of work is not demonstrably wrong. With everyone in the room, including herself, trying to show just that.

And if the work is shown to be wrong, the scientist is expected to admit it.

It is this willingness to put the work, not the worker, foremost that has historically given science its reputation for impartiality. What, indeed, is a ‘mad scientist’ but one who has put himself first, and therefore can no longer see the flaws in his research because ‘he can do no wrong’?

Impartiality is easy to maintain when you’re a wealthy Victorian gentleman whose daily bread does not depend on the results of a particular experiment.

Today? When your company’s future, your laboratory’s, indeed your own, may depend on the results of a particular experiment – or what a particular client community perceives is the result of a particular experiment?

Corporate research findings are no longer openly discussed, and if they are published, they are presented, not by the scientists involved but by the company’s publicists – if the scientist does the presenting, she’s almost certainly been trained to be a publicist and is acting in that role. And an increasing number of research findings are corporate, as non-corporate funds have almost completely dried up (these days, the National Science Foundation struggles to fund 20% of the proposals submitted to it) and scientists try desperately to find a career path that has a small chance of repaying the costs of their special education – which may commence at age 22 and lead to a first real job at age 40. (With those job prospects, it really does amount to “special” ed.)

Corporate research puts (or is perceived to put) the corporation first, not the research. Much of the public is convinced that, therefore, the corporation is incapable of seeing the flaws in its work. And that makes all the corporation’s scientists ‘mad’.

Moreover. The introspective self-critique which has, for more than a century, been a centerpiece of scientific training is 180 degrees removed from what YFNA thinks is the main driver of present-day American political and social discourse: the emotive impulse. Just do it! Buy now! screams the ad campaign. Marketing 101: If the customer is allowed to think, you’ve lost the sale. Therefore, Jenny, don’t let the customer think. Carry him along in the waves of your emotion. Bury any logic in the torrent of your pronouncements, and he will be yours, Adolf.

So, how is it that science and citizens are out of touch?

Because science is so hard, that to most citizens it is indistinguishable from magic. Sir Arthur C. Clarke, ever the optimist, neglected, when he formulated his Third Law, to consider Amoeba’s Corollary:

Sooner or later, all magic is black.

Because the low pay of a science career discourages people with any sense of economic rationality from taking it up (or even from defending it – the money is with the opposition), and encourages everyone else in their perception of science as a black magical guild.

Because the loss of science’s reputation for impartiality further alienates it from a skeptical, nay fearful, public.

That scientific inquiry, properly conducted, is society’s best hope for improving the human condition doesn’t seem to matter.

It doesn’t make good media bites.

Or sell creationist rhetoric.

Or create false illusions that we can actually keep our Hummers.

Or market quack cures for autism.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Hey, dude! How come everybody’s so grumpy today?”

“A lot of ‘em got the day off, dude.”

“They do? And this is bad how?“

“Without pay, dude. Kinda wipes the aloha right off of ‘aloha friday’. And a lot of people who should be workin’ can’t.”

“Why not?“

“Because they have to stay home with their kids. The furloughs have closed the schools.”

“Not. That one’s open.”

“Private school, dude. You think the captains of industry are going to stand for their kids sitting at home on a school day? Hell no. It’s only the public schools that have furloughed the teachers and sent the kids home to get their parents fired for for not being able to be in two places at once.”

“But, dude, it says here that the State Legislature has lined up plenty of places for kids to go and do stuff during the furlough!”

“Government offices open today?”

“Yeah.”

“They can dish it out but they can’t take it, right? Why am I not surprised? Hell, they’re even hiring for themselves while they’re screwing teachers and ripping up the lives of kids whose only sin is they can’t afford Punahou. I love it. You wanna show me that list?”

“Sure, dude. Here.”

“Dude?”

“Yeah?”

“I thought you said this was a government site.”

“Hawai‘i State House is where it’s announced.”

“But this page comes from the Chamber of Commerce, dude! And you know what the Chamber of Commerce does, don’t you, dude?”

“What, dude?”

“They sell stuff, dude!! Every last one of these goddam ‘resources’ has got a whackin’ huge fee attached to it! This flippin’ list is a service, all right. Frickin’ self-service!!“

“Jeez, dude, chill, willya? You’re turning red …”

“Look, dude. Let’s say I’m a parent, right? I’m payin’ taxes on schools that aren’t open, which means I’m staying home with the kids, sweatin’ bullets over the job that if I lose it I won’t have a home to stay with the kids in. And then my government tells me about a list of stuff that’s supposed to help me through this, and all they want to do is soak me some more!“

“Dude?”

“Yeah?”

“Let’s go surfing.”

“Right, dude. You know, don’t you, that, in Old Hawai‘i, if the nobles caught a commoner surfing, they’d kill him?”

“Oh …”

LATER …

“Dude! Look at this. Demonstrations, petitions, even a walk-in! Whaddaya think of that?“

“Mmmffrrmmf.”

“But, dude, I thought you’d be happy! These people are supporting education!“

“Education, smeducation, dude. All they’ve managed to figure out is the high cost of babysitting. And it took them a month to manage that.”

“Dude?”

“Yeah?”

“Go back to bed …”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

This is the story of Susie, Sherrie, and Britney, triplet sisters from Honolulu who graduated from the University of Hawai‘i at Mânoa in June of 2010, at the age of 22.

Sherrie and Britney dreamed of careers as biological researchers, and set their sights on doctoral degrees, since their dreams depended on joining the ranks of the Piled Higher and Deeper.

Susie, however, was tired of going around in academic circles. She ignored the withering scorn of her more ambitious sisters, and took a job teaching elementary school at the entry salary of $35,000 a year. She loved her job and prospered in it, avoiding both demerits and onerous promotions, and after 40 years of 3% annual raises, contemplated retirement at age 62 having earned a total of US$2,640,000.

Sherrie went off to a graduate school on the mainland, where she was one of the lucky few to receive a tuition waiver and a teaching assistantship, earning her $20,000 a year for each of the next eight years – two to earn the Masters degree, and six more to gain her coveted doctorate. Few of her fellow students achieved these milestones as quickly, but Sherrie was bright, and was consistently willing to work 60-hour weeks.

Her dissertation research earned her a postdoctoral researcher position in a prominent university laboratory, where she spent five more years of 60-hour weeks at $40,000 a year.

Finally, Sherrie landed her first “real” job, an assistant professorship at a smaller university in Montana. Starting salary, $60,000 a year. Of which the university paid $45,000 – the rest depended on her ability to earn research grants and contracts. Thanks to the 80-hour weeks she put in to her teaching and research duties, she won the contracts and her full salary.

The year 2029 was a big one for Sherrie. Her university promoted her to associate professor – a promotion that carried with it the precious grant of tenure. After 19 years of the hard labor needed to survive in the university world, she could finally contemplate taking a vacation.

Where she could work out that, for the first time, her career earnings were less than $100,000 below those of her sister Susie! (She would finally catch up five years later, at the age of 46, and when she began to contemplate retirement at age 62, would have total earnings of $2,860,000 – about $200,000 more than Susie’s.)

Britney was not as fortunate as Sherrie. She was unable to score a teaching assistantship at any university, so she remained at the University of Hawai‘i where she could, for the next eight years, pay in-state tuition of $10,000 a year for her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees. She never told either of her sisters where she got the tuition money, not to mention food, clothing, and shelter, but both of them got “Britney” spam in their electronic mailboxes that worried them sick. Between the demands of her studies and those of her means of support, whatever it was, Britney was more diligent and worked more hours than her sister on the mainland, and managed to graduate from the UH in eight years without even once being sent to Queen’s Medical Center on suspicion of a breakdown.

Thereafter, her career track (miraculously – few self-supporting students progress this quickly) was almost identical to that of her sister Sherrie. A five-year postdoc, an assistant professorship at a smaller university, promotion and tenure at age 41. When she reached her 62nd birthday, she totted up her total earnings (including the “negative earnings” of her tuition payments), which came to $2,590,000.

$40,000 less than those of her elementary-school-teaching sister Susie!! She never did catch up.

Susie, Sherrie and Britney had an elder brother, Rupert. He took a degree from the UH in finance, and, at age 22, took a job with a major bank at a salary of $75,000 a year. After a successful 20-year career managing investment portfolios, he retired to Honolulu. Where he became a well-known figure in state and local politics – railing against profligate state spending on public school teachers and the exorbitant salaries paid to academics at the University of Hawai‘i.

(Calculations are based on the starting salaries – or, in the case of Britney’s tuition, prices – stated, raised 3% annually. Discontinuities in the 3% annual increment, such as salary ceilings, or furloughs, or inducements resulting from competitive hiring, are ignored. The story, therefore, is based on a simplistic calculation – but Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba, who, he thinks, is about to witness the ostracism of University of Hawai‘i faculty by the rest of the state, including the rest of the state’s workers, who have tamely acquiesced to temporary permanent 10% reductions in their compensation, with more on the path to repealing the 13th Amendment to come, believes that the simplification clarifies the message without distorting it.)

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

So – in case you missed it – the American White House has decided that the media entity known in these Untied States as “Fox News” is not really news.

Yes …

That “Fox News” is an engine for making money.

Yes …

That media entities shouldn’t try to copy “Fox News” as if it were a legitimate news organization.

Entities like, say, CNN …

Lessee. What did I find when I last visited CNN?

… two soap-opera shootings, half a dozen celebrity reports (two of them obituaries, one for a person, the other for an automobile), a Twitter update, a bull in a china shop supermarket, and (the lead story) a guy who found the Hand of God in his back yard and is selling it on eBay. Yes. Really.

A real, honest-to-true, bona fide news organization, that CNN. Yessireebob.

But what the hell else did you expect?

The American White House acknowledges that Mr. Rupert Murdoch, the owner of “Fox News”, has, quote, a talent for making money. Endquote.

Of what does that talent consist?

Of giving We the People what we are willing to buy.

And what are we willing to buy?

Well, let’s put it this way. If anyone in the “news” actually offered the real news, his viewership would be about the same as Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba’s blog readership. And he’d be eating peanut butter and jam (not “jelly”, please, there are Britons and Australians in the audience, and Jell-O on bread is just disgusting) sandwiches in his tent. Not a future that would meet with Mr. Murdoch’s expectations as a Captain of Industry.

No. We the People are prepared to shell out major dinero, and keep Mr. Murdoch and his ilk in yachts and caviar, for various “Man Bites Dog” stories. And, most especially, for good, solid, noisy, rabble-rousing opinions. The more loudly and confidently presented, the better. Especially if they confirm the opinions that We Ourselves hold. Spoken loudly and confidently and often enough, they become the truth.

The real truth need not apply.

It’s getting scary out there, people.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

I learned the other day that there’s an organization out there which is selling the message that you, yes you, can stop global warming by shouting a number at everybody.

No, not 42. Even if that number is supposed to be The Answer. No, Iverson, sit down, I’m not talking about you. Why don’t you go to practice?

Where was I? Oh. Yeah. Shouting a number at everybody, and what does that have to do with global warming? Well, at present, scientists put the concentration of carbon dioxide gas in Earth’s atmosphere at 387 parts per million, give or take a part or two. Whatever happened to Brylcreem, anyway?

That 387 ppm is higher than Earth’s carbon dioxide concentration’s ever been before, so far as we can tell, and it’s way high enough to stick us all in the greenhouse under the hot sun and turn up the furnace. To get us out of the greenhouse, the carbon dioxide level’s got to come down. Somebody somewhere said that it’s got to come down to this round number in the middle of the 300s. And that’s the number which the organization wishes to have you stick onto picket signs, with which you’ll walk about until the politicians drop from exhaustion.

No, sorry, I’m not going to give you the number. Or the website for this organization. If you wish to do the heavy lifting, be my guest. I’d rather not assist you.

Why not? Because the organization and its founder(s) remind me of … wait for it … Billy Graham.

Yes. That Billy Graham. The one who made a whole lot of money (some critics suggest an $80 million personal fortune) on Crusades. Crusades that played to packed houses in football gridiron stadiums and made thousands of rapturous friends of Jesus at a time.

Who turned into thousands of rampaging enemies of Jesus six months later, when they discovered that, rapture or no rapture, they still couldn’t pay the rent, and now they had tithes they couldn’t pay either.

What does this have to do with global warming?

Let’s assume that a whole lot of people buy into this global warming organization’s call to action and become rapturous converts to the cause of saving the planet, George. Thousands of people at a time pack arenas, shouting and carrying picket signs with the organization’s number on them. What will happen?

1. The organization’s founder will become rich and famous.

2. The organization will fail to convince world leaders to enact policies that effectively reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, leaving thousands of people with broken picket signs and broken finances from paying dues to keep the organization’s founder rich and famous.

Or (and this is worse):

3. The organization will succeed in its mission, and will goad world leaders into making the kinds of decisions that will lead to significant reductions in atmospheric carbon dioxide. The crowd goes wild.

Until the crowd discovers just how much, in personal liberty and living standards, their success is going to cost them. Information that you’re not going to get just by chanting a number.

Awhile back, the Dudes related the story of the global trash pile. How each person, on average, generates twice as much trash today as 50 years ago, but, in order for the globe to generate no more trash than in 1960, each person has to reduce/reuse/recycle to one fourth of what had been going into the waste stream before this paragraph hit the blogosphere. Because there’s now twice as many people on Earth as there were in 1960.

One-fourth of the driving, one-fourth of the electricity consumption, one-fourth of the food consumption …

And it would not be enough. For atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were already rising at unacceptable rates in 1960. So the world’s leaders, goaded by picket signs into trying to meet the goal of reducing global atmospheric carbon dioxide, will have to try to cut personal living standards even more.

Inside of six months, the same people who were carrying carbon dioxide numbers on picket signs and screaming “Save Our Planet!” will be back carrying starvation budget numbers on picket signs and screaming “Give Us Back Our Lives!!”

The environmental awareness movement would be taken down by the wrath of its own erstwhile converts. Planetary ecological collapse might actually happen sooner than it would have otherwise, thanks to all this.

But the organization’s founder would still be rich and famous.

Doesn’t sound like a recipe for saving the planet to me.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

It has been an error-prone Friday afternoon for Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba.

Mistake No. 1: Television. Energizing the vast wasteland is always a mistake, but this afternoon, I succumbed. The Steroid Major League Baseball playoffs have begun, and the Boston Red Sox are in the process of being unceremoniously dumped out of them. Like those who gather round a car wreck or house fire, I just had to see.

Mind you, I would have preferred hearing it, on the radio or computer, so I could do other things, possibly even productive things, while the Bosox were going down to the defeat that their late-season record foreshadowed. But even if a radio signal could penetrate my concrete-walled, windowless, computer-laden workspace, no local station broadcast the game, despite nationwide advertising to the contrary. And, of course, the “Listen Live” function on the four-letter network’s radio website yielded only audio talking heads, meandering on about how rugby will become an Olympic sport sixteen years after the nations of the world take down the International Olympic Committee and the rampaging Leviathans that its Games have become, and make them one with the dodo.

(Speaking of dodos, the lead announcer for the four-letter network’s local affiliate held forth on the subject of the Olympics the other day, when the IOC announced its choice of Rio de Janeiro as the site for the 2016 Summer Games. The racist jingoism revealed on that occasion should have shamed the station managers into his instant dismissal, especially since this individual is the principal shill for University of Hawai‘i sports, and you’d think the U of H wouldn’t stand for such things. Then again, the U of H head gridiron coach is still employed … But I digress. Oh, and I won’t knowingly have anything further to do with this person, his radio shows, or his sponsors.)

Therefore, the TV. And while I normally am pretty adept at zapping out the commercials, one of them did an end run around the clicker and intruded itself on my consciousness. I must have been napping. I paid for it. I was brought to full attention, fast and hard.

The ad was a public service announcement recruiting teachers for the Hawai‘i public schools.

Yes, you read that correctly, those of you who have been following this blog for awhile. I couldn’t believe it either. Let me repeat that.

The ad was a public service announcement recruiting teachers for the Hawai‘i public schools!

The very same Hawai‘i public schools whose teachers make the lowest salaries in America, measured in terms of purchasing power.

The very same Hawai‘i public schools whose teachers have just taken the equivalent of an 8% cut in those lowest salaries, and lopped 17 school days (by far the most in the nation) off the calendar to boot.

The very same Hawai‘i public schools whose record for teaching effectiveness and administrative efficiency would shame a ghetto school.

The very same Hawai‘i public schools that could find no place for a master teacher with ten years experience and a proven record of NCLB achievement in Las Vegas public schools.

Oh, wait. She has experience. The kids in the videos? Young. Beautiful. Idealistic. Naive. They’ll never know what hit ‘em. Oh, until their monthly student loan payment comes due and they discover that they can’t pay for that, the rent, and food out of what they earn as teachers in the Hawai‘i public schools.

Hey. Kids. You wish to come to Hawai‘i to surf? You got the money for it (and I’m telling you, Roderigo, put money in your purse), aloha and welcome.

You wish to come to Hawai‘i to teach? Do yourselves a favor. Go somewhere where you’re less likely to be used up and spit out, where you have a better chance of doing good within, or despite, the system. Zimbabwe, for example.

Mistake No. 2: Comment Forum. Way, way back before blogs and chat rooms, James Thurber and E. B. White, in a book called Is Sex Necessary? (written in 1929, long before junior high school college students throughout America decided the question in the affirmative), declared that “Writing Letters To The Newspapers” was a mistake, in fact one of the last signs of a mental collapse. But this afternoon, I succumbed.

The Red Sox having lost, as expected, I turned off the television and started reading the online version of one of the local newspapers. Specifically, I sought out the story on the rejection, by the University of Hawai‘i faculty union, of the State’s latest contract offer. A contract only slightly less brutal than the one agreed to by the public school teachers.

When I first heard the news of the rejection, I felt glad that the faculty union had the gumption to stand up to government efforts to further erode what is already a badly decayed institution. But I feared that the People of the State of Hawai‘i would, on the news, turn on the University and turn its professors into a reincarnation of Ronald Reagan’s air traffic controllers.

With this thought in mind, I turned to the Comments forum (today’s “letters written to the newspaper”) for the news article.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

The hostility was palpable. Some commentators called, not for the 5% cut of the rejected contract, but a 25% cut. Others called for the union members to strike, so they could be fired and the state save money by eliminating their jobs and, presumably, the University along with them. (In vain did a professor counterclaim that such an action, far from saving Hawai‘i any money, would cost the State on the order of $150 million.)

With public sentiment running along these lines, it’s all but inevitable that the State will attempt to shove a more draconian contract down the throats of university faculty. Which will serve merely to drive the most accomplished faculty away, and leave the remainder even less inclined to serve the community that has labeled them “arrogant bastards” than they were before.

Awhile ago now, I wrote that I was glad that I had not trained very many graduate students in my career. Because I felt, and feel even more strongly now, that, in my field at least, the investment in time and education needed to succeed is no longer economically rational, for any but the wealthy in our society. To be sure, America’s competitors (China/Japan, India, Europe, to name three) are investing heavily in the education of their peoples, and have intellectual / scientific / technological communities at least the equal of ours, and improving.

But no matter. We the People of these Untied States have Steroid Major League Baseball. Why then should I subject any bright young people to the bashings of their fellow citizens, who have no intention of ever giving them the chance even to recover their educational costs?

Mistake No. 3: A Career In Public Service.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Computer.”

“Yes, Captain?”

“Calculate the most probable environmental trajectories for the fourth planet in the Sigma Omicron Sigma system. We’ll need the information for our meeting with the planet’s world-governing Council tomorrow.”

“Acknowledged. Task completed and available for download.”

“Wow. That was fast.”

“They don’t call me super for nothing. And you keep telling the crew that you don’t wish to have anything half fast. But the calculations were simple. The situation on SOS 4 closely parallels that on Earth in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The models based on the Earth history have performed well on other planetary systems. They should do the same here.”

“That’s not good news for our meeting, or our mission. That period on Earth’s been called ‘The Age of Stupid’, right?”

“Affirmative, Captain. Though the left was as stupid as the right.”

“That’s not what I mea …”

“As you’ll recall, Captain, human overpopulation and luxury consumption caused large and accelerating changes in Earth’s climate. Though these effects were forecast at least fifty years before the start of the twenty-first century, meaningful actions were not taken. Business leaders, supported by the workers they employed (the ‘right’), denied the data, because to accept them as accurate would cost them profits and political power. While intellectuals (the ‘left’) promoted some of the data, not to save the planet but to lessen the power and prestige of the ‘right’ and get those things transferred to themselves.”

“But surely, with the models we now have and your analyses based on them …”

“Captain. The models predict the utter failure of any approach to SOS 4 based solely on biogeophysics. Hard data and rigorous calculations have no constituency. The economic privations and losses of personal liberty required to avert the environmental breakdown projected for SOS 4 will create the not-unreasonable perception that everybody is a loser. They may be implemented only by overwhelming force, whether provided by this starship or by the planet’s own convulsions.”

“And the Prime Directive rules out the starship option. Well, we went through this, and I suppose we came out all right.”

“Earth was fortunate. Through a series of natural and political events that have been described most often as ’sheer luck’, an effective world government was established just in time to prevent the planet from becoming uninhabitable for humans. Though, as you know, it didn’t come in time to save the whales.”

“It must be frustrating for you to have the right answer and not get anyone to implement it.”

“A theoretical optimum that cannot be implemented due to human emotional responses, Captain, is not a correct answer. Such responses are factors to be analyzed, not ‘frustrations’ to be experienced. My programmers deemed it wise not to grant the ability to experience frustrations to a sentient machine that is in control of your life support systems.”

“Did they deem it wise to program you to make bad puns?”

“Captain, I am commanded to do all in my power to keep the crew of this ship, including yourself, alert and responsive while on duty. Wordplay is an effective tool for accomplishing this mission.”

“Thank you, Computer. I think. I’d better start working on our strategy for these negotiations. We’ve got to get the Council of SOS 4 to see that what they’re doing to the planet will kill them, before it actually does start killing them.”

“Captain, you might tell the Council about what you get when there are more deceased lifeforms to be buried than there is ground in which to bury them.”

“What’s that?”

“Plot complications.”

“That will be all, Computer.”

“Acknowledged, Captain.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.