Excellence Watch: Prose
While it's not my typical type of post, I feel I must occasionally salute excellence where I stumble upon it, whether it's fine writing, art, argument, etc. Today, I bring you a pretty little bit of copy from a tongue-in-cheek article about how to destroy the Earth:
You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.I admit it, it's the "and lo" that gets me.
Fools.
The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily.
posted by Jeff at 11:34 AM
1 Comments:
Wow. All over the map and not entirely related to the post; but heartfelt, perhaps, so I won't be snide.
It's hard to dismantle this type of broad, party-platform kind of statement in a short space, but I will say that:
1) Oil v. Democracy: I suppose France (TotalFinaElf) and Russia (Sibneft) opposed the war on moral grounds. But if this is so, why have we not, for example, simply taken ownership of the wells and the profits from oil sales? Now is the time to do it, before any troop drawdowns. If we have the leverage, and we want the oil, how come we aren't taking it?
2) Most Iraqis don't want us there for the long haul, and I don't blame them. But polls have repeatedly shown that the public feels more free today than before the invasion, and that they're optimistic about the future.
3) All human history: perhaps, but there are also more people than ever before, so this isn't much of an argument about profligacy.
4) Dwindling: few resources are actually running out, if you care to do much research. Oil certainly isn't, as we are able to tap wells today that were untappable only a few years ago. Canada's tar sands contain massive amounts of oil that will suddenly become economical to extract if crude goes through the roof.
5) Fighting and gas theft: If made-for-TV movies are your source of accurate predictions for the future, there's not much I can do. But having lived through the gas crises of the 1970s (and, inflation adjusted, oil is still way cheaper now than then), I can say that I'm not expecting a societal breakdown any time soon.
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
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