Can We Cooperate?
A friend asked me the other day what I thought would be required to bring humankind together in a concerted effort to deal with the impending climate catastrophe.
It’s a big question. One has to think that such an event would be initiated by governments, but the COP meetings have been a huge disappointment, having taken us essentially nowhere. That’s because moneyed interests stand to lose big, but it’s also due to the fact that the challenge with climate change mitigation is that the problem is presenting itself over a period of many decades, not months or even a couple of years.
Yet suppose that this were not the case. Imagine we had an alien invasion from distinctly hostile beings. Would our leaders be effective in coordinating an effort to protect ourselves?
Even in that case, keep in mind that a great number of these so-called “leaders” are obviously sociopaths, whose judgement is anything but sane. Think about Kim Jong-un, Putin, Duterte, Erdogan, Orbán, and, from 2017 – 2021, Trump. On top of that, you have 50-or-so lesser-known dictators whose rationality and love of the human race is questionable at best.
It’s possible that cooperation, the commodity of which our survival depends, hangs out of reach.
One of the reasons that atheists don’t believe in God is that they don’t think His existence adds anything in terms of our understanding of the world around us. From Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, “If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.”
A reader, Tom, submitted the graph below as evidence that climate change is a hoax.
There is only one explanation: The United States had become a land of “haves and have-nots,” the latter group consisting largely of white working-class individuals, angry at their failure to succeed financially, woefully undereducated, and as full of hate as they were of ignorance.
I like this, but I wouldn’t call blaming Biden for inflation “lazy thinking.”
A good measure of the speed at which this country has descended is its seemingly limitless hunger for lies. Voter fraud, the climate hoax, the ineffectiveness of masks and vaccinations, it’s all the same.
The cartoon stands as a reminder that, in the course of my years on this planet, I’ve watched unbridled capitalism morph from:
We live in a time where the most powerful country on Earth is teetering on the edge of losing its democracy, and the richest person on the planet is pushing it off the cliff with all his might.
Of the main monotheistic (Abrahamic) religions, Judaism is, IMO, the most benign, for the reason presented at left. It’s certainly the least convoluted; there is no Holy Trinity, for instance. It also requires the least acceptance of bizarre, and in some cases anti-humanistic tenets. No one is going to burn in hell for eternity because he was accidentally born in the wrong part of the world.
Like so many other phenomena that govern the warming of our planet, the 
