But honestly, folks, having safely returned from a symposium by the Galactic Centre for Terrestrial Studies (GCTS) - the Ophiuchusian equivalent of the Royal Society - I remain somewhat isolated in believing that intelligent life might actually exist on earth. And may this be last time, please God, that I am ever called upon to defend it. What’s more, many Ophiuchusians hold views on human intelligence that do not alight well with politically correct doctrine as disseminated on this planet. But since political correctness has frequently pronounced me a racist bitch, a homophobic anti-feminist, and potentially insane, it is not - in my opinion - entirely to be trusted. Nor was I deliberately trying to be provocative. Let’s face it, plain human idiocy stuffed in a closet of political correctness gets no less stultifying with being aired. But I beg you, nevertheless, fellow-aliens, to give a moment of your time to this particular post, and to try and stick with it to the end.
To begin with, I concede readily every person’s right to his own opinion on the merits of any topic they’re appraising. Needless to say. But I do reserve the right to resent very emphatically any climate change sceptic who writes from an ivory tower. Indeed, I note, that there's still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the warming trend. And I hate to call anyone a liar. Fact is, I also humbly acknowledge the intriguing scientific case that the world is in a global thaw after the last Ice Age, rather than warming to 6,5 billion people putting out 7 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere.
That’s fine by me. That and the filth...
Nor am I about to embark on an asinine harangue about buggeroff benefits of carbon capture technology. I really couldn't give a monkey's. And I don’t care tuppence either about anthropogenic chlorofluorocarbons or impending ozone depletion. That's clean over my head, if you don’t mind the pun. But what I do care about - the joy of sex apart - is not getting mugged, stabbed, run over, poisoned, asphyxiated, raped, or urinated on, the moment I step out of doors. Frankly, you don’t need chlorofluorocarbon-science to capture the true chaotic horror of the Biblical admonition “go forth and multiply.” The countryside is humanity’s scrap yard. We are in each other's faces as never before. Humans are compressing the Earth's Lebensraum with no hint of the horror to come. Gaia’s demographic bounty, certainly no less than every bit of contaminated, tarmac-fouled, urbanised, poisonous, gasoline-and-pesticide polluted countryside, richly attests to that. And what are we doing? We feature in a comedy that aims to remind people to turn off their lights?
Lord give me strength...!
There are now almost seven billion of us on this blue and fragile planet. There will be nine billion in less than forty years' time. What happens when people start arguing, not about lightbulbs but food and water? And there’s no doubt they will. What are we going to do when people start arriving on our shores fleeing not political persecution but environmental catastrophe?
Shoot them, I suppose.
There are more than 11m abandoned children in India alone, where in a growing number of vast urban slums newborn babies are being dumped anonymously in cots placed outside orphanages. Perversely - in an extraordinary subversion of UN population policy - in some Eurocountries, such as France, governments have introduced financial incentives for women to have more than two children. The Spanish government awards £ 2,000 to mothers on the birth of each child. China, by contrast - and this is where I can’t help approving, callous bitch that I am - executes more than 10,000 people a year (albeit the wrong sort). Obviously, they’ve seen too much of it to have any respect for human life. In fact, the Chinese government has moved away from economic incentives for children and awards punishment, instead. And not just punishment. Babies are snuffed out. Or abandoned at birth on rubbish heaps, doorsteps, bus stops, railway stations and hospitals.
In Britain they live in a fool's paradise
An English mum was aiming for her eighth child last year. Set to become the most prolific surrogate mother in the UK by carrying other couple's babies. A number of British mothers have even frozen their eggs so their infertile daughters can use them to give birth. Others are selling them. And not only eggs. The government is to sanction fatherless families by giving single women and lesbian couples an entitlement to fertility treatment. Dozens of gay British men - who for fear of a libel action I hesitate to call parasitic - have paid about £33,000 to create a child of their chosen sex on an IVF programme for two-father (sic) families. Eureka: a 67-year-old woman became the world’s oldest mother when she gave birth to twins after having travelled to America for IVF.
We are an astonishing nation!
Here we have an advanced technological species failing under the weight of idiotic affirmative action, bogus equal opportunity, endemic kleptocracy, escalating traffic congestion, and chaotic maladministration, while trying to save the world with low-energy light bulbs, solar panels, windmills, and compulsory loft-insulations. No wonder, the Galactic Centre for Terrestrial Studies showed no particular interest in what, clearly, it assumes to be a superannuated and elusive fragment of a declining terrestrial race, switching off the lights with a feeling of foreboding in their hearts, though obviously no brains in their heads.
Truth to tell, I myself have few virtues - my incurable passion for adorable fat little babies apart - but I do know that population management, not carbon manipulation, is our only shot at survival.
What this pathetic, mendacious effort in carbon capture technology leads to is simply a decline in futuristic and scientific imagination, and perceptions of a coming new dark age rather than visions of the conquest of space. The introduction of mediaeval windmill machinery instead of nuclear fusion technology, brutalised fossil expertise, and an atrophy of cosmic creativity, while lacking the elegance and conditional structures essential for evolutionary thinking, to say nothing of the failure to build highly optimised conceptual frameworks in space - the whole point of evolution and the basis of a higher-order human identity.
‘Ever fewer climb with me up ever higher mountains,’ Nietzsche once wrote, but for God‘s sake, homo sapiens, turn on the lights...
Dreamy
