Friday 23 May 2008

How to merge two national losses into a win.

According to ABC reports today:

  1. Losing space race: Aust lags in space race: Andy Thomas It seems apparent by the comments on this article, that your average Australian is totally confused about this issue: confusing the space-race and its possible spinoffs with science in general. The need to engage in the science, and in a space-race seem to be inextricably merged into the same argument. The space-race is at the heart of science, right? The best way to further science is via the space-race, right? That's the trouble with democracy: total idiots get the same vote.
  2. The Australian Greens leader Bob Brown has lost a last ditch attempt to stop the logging of Tasmania's Wielangta State Forest.
How to turn two loses into a win? I await the opinion to appear, that the fix for this problem will be to push harder for Australia's re-involvement in the space-race on the grounds that it will be instrumental in us finding a good place to live after we have logged planet Earth dry.

Will only the rich and powerful get to ride the dreamship to our new home in the next galaxy. If so, cant we get them into a rocket now, and launch them all soon, before they do any more damage. All the leaders in the logging industry will be in there, plus those from the mines, and Silicon Valley. After they are gone, perhaps everyone else will get to turn the logging machines off, and the fill back in the holes in the ground. We will have to make do with less silicon, so computers and artificially magnified breasts will all be lost in the dreamtime of your average nerd, logger and stripper.

Then again, will the rich and powerful round up the rest of us and send us off instead, while they stay here? Afterwards, will they and their robots fix the place up here for themselves. I wonder how they are going to pull that scam off. Let's see...
  • They covered up the Kennedy killing well so far, and
  • got away with complicity in the drug trade to fund the anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 80's even though the product was heading to their own GIs in Vietnam, and
  • got away with the WMD spin for long enough for their needs, after which only a few bush idiot's get the blame anyway, and
  • have covered up the 9/11 issues like 2 totally vapourised aircraft, and how the towers fell, and who really was pulling the strings there.
But conning an entire global population minus 5% to step off the planet, now that will take some doing. Is religion the answer? It worked in the past. It has kept man killing man in the name of God for centuries, at least until recently. The trouble lately though is that religion does not have the pull it used to. Even by Hitler's time they needed to move onto a ethnic/cultural issues, and exterminating Jews was not really the main thrust of Hitler's show. Political dogma like Communism vs Capitalism ran for less than one century. Since then, religious ferver has become more visible again, thanks in part to global telecommunications. On one side we have the religiously led nut-case God-fearing loonies in the USA, and on the other the entire Muslim world, if you want to believe the Yanks. However while American policy and spin goes round the world in a millisecond, the negative effects of Islam fervour only directly affect a few hundred at a time, as the odd religious loony has been convinced to step up, out and off, and take a few near them along. If it weren't for global telecommunications we would hardly know of it happening. (Q: How many died in Africa yesterday? No news = 0 died, right. Yet everyone gets to know that 3 died on the West Bank or 30 in Iraq.) Terrorist bombings has been a very fragmented effort so far, and I do not envisage your average Muslim taking it up as their new sport. To get 95% of the population to depart Earth one way or another, as shrapnel-fodder or in a rocket, is just not going to happen.

So the rich and powerful won't leave because they are too smart to commit suicide in a rocket, no matter how big it is, and the great unwashed will not leave because there is unlikely to be a single sufficiently powerful religion for them to follow into that abyss.So where does that leave us?

Right back here on Earth.
All of us.
Together.
Fighting to get to the top of the pile, that sits on an ever more barren and toxic dump.


Nice going religious loonies.
Nice going space-race nerds, and rat-race leaders.
Nice work.
Choice.


Anyway, back to the topic:

Q: What is going to happen next in the Wielangta State Forest?
Its going to be logged in an 'environmentally responsible and sustainable' fashion.

Q:What are the long-term prospects for the Wielangta State Forest?
A:What Wielangta State Forest?

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