I forgot to write about running yesterday. It was tough, so hot, about 90F, super-humid, and after running 3.5km, and thereafter taking a cold shower, my face took 45 minutes to return from beetroot to its normal colour! And it was a little rosy for a long time after that too!
Today was lovely, soft and damp, 66F, positively cool! I ran 5.14km. Molly refuses to go down Babbling Brook Hill, absolutely refuses, because she knows that it is hard on the knees, the lungs and the soul. It took me 41 minutes, which means 8 minutes per km, which isn't terribly good, but still.
So this Gulf Oil Disaster. It is such a mess, such a terrible mess. It is incomprehensible to me that we continue to do this kind of thing, we do not learn. The ocean is not endlessly able to fix itself. The earth is not infinitely available for abuse.
Obama put a moratorium on oil drilling for six months and immediately was taken to the courts, the plaintiffs claiming that too many people would be out of work if they were to stop drilling.
Here's the thing. We need to put all ALL ALL our resources into weaning ourselves off all the products that contain oil, like pesticides, a petrochemical product which enters our bodies through things like apples, bananas, cantaloupes, carrots and broccoli are all rife with these chemicals. plastics. All plastics are made from petroleum, and are easily absorbed by meat, cheese and other fatty foods. Cosmetics, medicines, soaps, sunscreens, hair products, clothing, tampons, etc. The list is endless.
And all our resources should be going into alternative forms of energy, like solar, wind, hydro-electric power.
The way to find money to do this is to dismantle the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the former, tribalism will take over as soon as the Americans depart, which is supposedly next year, according to plan, so why not just hurry the withdrawal up by a few months? I'm afraid that we have to leave countries like that to their own devices, it is too dangerous to waste another minute there, another billion dollars every two days! It is ridiculous. All we are fighting for is control of the oil, and we don't need it, the world doesn't need it, not in such vast quantities.
We have brilliant minds here in America and elsewhere in the world, let them get to work to solve these problems, put a moratorium on drilling for oil in the ocean forever!
It is unimaginable that we will go on doing the same thing, I even heard someone on the radio today saying that what we have learnt from this oil spill will do us well in the next disaster! So there WILL be another one, but don't worry, we learned stuff the last time around. Oh yes, like how long a brown pelican takes to die, in agony, drowning in oil? Or a dolphin coming up for air, and slowly suffocating from oil coating its blowhole, its breath, unable to swim through brown oily water, the clear blue only a memory now, and then not even a memory. Just death, death and more death, for months, for years, whole species extinct!
It is the same with nuclear power. I cannot and never could understand how after Chernobyl anyone with any intelligence at all could possible imagine building another nuclear power plant. And yet they did, and they continue to do so. The spent fuel from these plants takes 10 000 years to be broken down. 10 000 years! How can you even begin to think about such a number with a clear mind? How can you imagine that there will never again be human error which will cause another disaster, which could be fatal to the earth this time?
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