Thursday, December 17, 2009

And Then What?

Earth_Shot
Scientists Reveal Conservative "Plan B"

If you're like me, and have listened for more than four consecutive minutes of any Hate Media broadcast in the last 20 years, you've often wondered, "OK, so after the Pig People's dearest wishes come true, then what?"

After they've crushed the average citizen into an economic caste system where health and education will be forever beyond their reach, then what?

After they've dumbed down and deregulated the United States into a feudalist pesthole of lawless oligarchs and Costco greeters

then what?

After they've sold our children's futures to China, then what?

After they've turned our military over to Exxon outright, then what?

After they've slagged the planet, then what?


Sure, for the militia nuts and keyboard chickenhawks who see a Mad Max future as their last, best hope of getting laid outside of paying crack whores for handjobs, a broke, ignorant, terrified, starving, nuclear-armed, Limbaugh-ruled Confederacy is fucking Candyland.

And for the Christopaths who look at the possibility of global slaughter and catastrophe as the engraved invitations the Prince of Peace has been waiting for to kick off the Rapture, Armageddon is just God's kooky little coming attractions reel before the real movie starts.

But when you factor out the racists, the gun nuts, the Randites, the homophobes and the theocrats, you still are left with those 20 or 30 Conservatives for whom you would think the end of the world would seem like, y'know, a bad idea.

Turns out, they have an exit strategy too (from Yahoo News):

Scientists discover Earth-like, water-rich planet: study

PARIS (AFP) – Astronomers have discovered a new Earth-like planet that is larger than our own and may be more than half covered with water, according to a study published Wednesday in the science journal Nature.

The so-called "super Earth" is about 42 light years away in another solar system and has a radius nearly 2.7 times larger than that of our planet, according to the study by the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

The discovery of the planet, called GJ 1214b, represents a "major step forward" in the search for worlds similar to the Earth, added the University of California's Geoffrey Marcy in a commentary also in Nature.

The "newfound world" is too hot to sustain life as we know it, said the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in a statement.
...


The upside: Everybody in the business knows that "too hot to sustain life as we know it" is just interstellar real estate code for "Gated white community/ golf course accessible". So boo-ya!

The downside: While 42 light years away may sound almost shout-across-the-alley close, when you run the numbers you quickly realize that comes to just under 240,943,549,794,202 miles. And at those distances, the price of daily home delivery of the Wall Street Journal approaches infinity.

6 comments:

Fran / Blue Gal said...

Don't forget also too that "gated white communities" are often "no kids" so that whole "future for me and not for thee" is already codified beyond belief.

Wonderful post here, dude.

Anonymous said...

I woke up to this card in my little Sierra Club deck:

The crisis we now face calls for PASSION...Why shouldn't I be angry, emotional, passionate? Madmen and madwomen are wrecking this beautiful, blue-green, living Earth. Fiends who hold nothing of value but a greasy dollar bill are tearing down the pillars of evolution a-building for nearly four thousand million years...We must break out of society's freeze on our passions. We must feel the tug of the moon, hear goose music overhead. We must love Earth and rage against her destroyers.
Dave Foreman

Thanks for raging against the fiends, with passion, DG.

Anonymous said...

"And then what?"

As Gore Vidal once wrote:

"They think they'll get lots of maids and gardners...but they're also going to get some American cities on fire."

I don't know if it will get that far, but there are going to be more and more pissed-off americans when the chickens that Obama is helping the republicans release, come home to roost.

Palamedes said...

Every time, large and small, in this country, that we get to where most people are quite literally screwed to the post, people die.

Sometimes it's Haymarket.
Sometimes it's Ludlow.
Sometimes it's the Pullman Strike.
Sometimes it's 9/16/1920.

We'll find Wobblies/Reds/DFH's to blame, but it will ultimately be on the heads of those who confuse good Christian charity with treating their fellow human beings somewhere between callously and indifferently while wearing french cuffs and a diamond stickpin.

I hope we can avoid this.
I volunteer to avoid this.
I don't know if it's enough.

jim said...

Only 42 light-years away?

Heck, it'll hardly take us much more than 25,000 years to get there, if we get going RIGHT NOW!

Come on everyone - start packing!

Serving Patriot said...

I think we should be building the spaceship to take those worthies there straight away!

At least then they could leave us good folk to fix our current world problems in peace.

SP