My wife and I share many compatibilities, which is a good thing after nearly 40 years of marriage. Up near the top of the list is our mutual agreement about pets or, rather, the lack of them.

First, let me dispel a few assumptions you’re probably already making. Neither of us is afraid of dogs, cats, or other common house pets. OK, a few of the less common ones make us uncomfortable. Say, boa constrictors. Neither one of us actually dislikes cute little puppies or pretty pussycats, although I’m not so sure we feel the same way about pet rats, but I doubt that anyone would blame us for that. (A digression: My worst summer job was doing vaginal Pap smears on 50 rats every day as part of a contraceptive research project when I was in college. The rats weren’t happy about it, either.)

No, the real issue is the Nuisance Quotient, which can be thought of as an opportunity cost:

NQ = [What I could be doing] / [What I have to do for the dog, cat, etc.]

In my book, the NQ is always unfavorable except, perhaps, for a fresh water tropical fish tank, and even that’s iffy.

People ask us whether, now that our kids are grown and married and gone, we’re going to get a dog. We say, why f**k up our lives? Now we can go anywhere, do anything, without worrying about the kids. Why worry about pets? As time has gone by, we’ve only become more resolute about this.

Another, not entirely unrelated issue, is that we’ve become intolerant the assumption made by so many people that we’ll love their pets. Getting jumped on by some slobbering pooch while sitting on the couch at a friend’s house is a) unpleasant, b) inconsiderate on the part of the pet owner, who should be keeping the animal locked up somewhere, and c) the cause of an otherwise unnecessary dry cleaning bill.

This pet thing has sloshed over onto social media, as well. Recently, I’ve noted that my Facebook page is getting bombarded by pet photos. Along with the rest of the detritus that regularly shows up on Facebook (and, presumably, other social media sites), these photos are simply unwelcome clutter posted by people with too much time on their hands. So, I’ve resolved to block the postings of anyone who repeatedly dumps Fido and Puddy into my page.

This may surprise you, but I was a zoology major in college. Animals fascinate me. But people and their pets, not so much. And don’t even get me started on people who don’t pick up after their crapping dogs…

It’s been obvious now for a number of years that the right wing dominated Republican Party exists through maintenance of a class system. Only by pushing policies that keep the rich rich and the poor poor can they succeed. This is bad. This is very bad. But even worse is the simple fact they have crossed a line and now become willful and unrepentant imbeciles. The result is going to be destruction of the planet. Think I’m overreacting? Read on. Oh, I know this seems extreme, but bear with me for a moment and you may come, if reluctantly, to agree with me.

• Opposition to nearly all environment legislation: Newest on the Republican hit list is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed setting of new limits on mercury and arsenic contamination by big industry (which also opposes new regulations). Mercury is a known neurotoxin that can delay or damage children’s neurological development and result in disabilities including blindness. It’s not good for adults, either. Both substances are emitted by coal-fired plants, and Republicans, in particular, don’t give a shit that we’re poisoning ourselves with the stuff.
• Opposition to regulation of other air pollutants: As we all know, Republicans are constitutionally incapable of supporting substantial expenditures for alternative sources of energy. Thus, in addition to what is pouring out of coal-fired plants, we’re also spewing pollutants from our cars’ and trucks’ tailpipes. In the March 26, 2015 issue of the L.A. Times, reporter Geoffrey Moran cites a study in the recent issue of the Journal of the American Association Psychiatry that supports this pollution as a cause of lower cognitive processing and ADHD in children.
• Opposition to vaccination: The imbecility of this is almost beyond belief. As idiots like Rand Paul say that the choice of vaccination should be left to individuals (and damn the risk to the general public), we now see rising incidences of measles and whooping cough, diseases that can maim or be lethal and that were nearly absent until scientific ignoramuses like Jennie McCarthy came on the scene and Republican politicians decided to take us headlong into the good ol’ days of disability and death.
• Refusal to believe in the human contribution to climate change: If not the above, then this is what’s going to kill us all. 2014 was the warmest year on record for our planet. The fact that morons like James Inhofe can stand in front of Congress with a snowball and deny climate change is proof that Republicans are going to kill us all. The oceans are rising as polar ice melts. Severe storms are becoming more common and destructive. Whole islands and parts of the U.S. coast are going to be flooded into non-existence. The Western U.S. is struggling with record drought. Climate change is going to lead to mass migrations, and these will lead to conflict and killing.

And why do Republicans behave the way they do? Here are two observations I’ve made:

• The U.S. has become a corporatized nation. We’re no longer a representative democracy. Corporations own our politicians, and corporations only feel accountable to their shareholders, not to the public – or the world – at large. Big oil rules, and plans to do so until we all die of suffocation. After all, it’s short term gain that interests them. Not the future for the executives’ descendants.
• The Republican right’s drift into more and more literal, fundamentalist religion with a belief in the “Rapture” means that they can do anything to the planet now because it won’t matter then the Rapture lifts them up to that great paradise in the sky. Yes, these superstitious yahoos actually don’t care about the planet because, to many of them, it’s irrelevant. God will save the deserving while the rest of us go to hell.

C’mon folks. This is 2015. We should have long grown out of primitive superstition. God doesn’t save children from burning buildings. Firemen do. God doesn’t save people with busted guts from dying. Surgeons do. And God isn’t going to save us from the havoc being wrought on the planet through our own environmental disrespect. Only we can do that, and if we don’t wake up and take action, it will soon be too late. Uncontrolled pollution, uncontrolled population growth, lack of potable water, severe weather…Republicans and Democrats, but mostly Republicans (including those dolts on the Supreme Court), better get with it soon, or there’ll be hell to pay for all of us, and not just us infidels.

Readers of this blog have often noted my despair over the deficiencies in our educational system and, specifically, the degree of people’s scientific ignorance. Think: James Inhof. In light of this, I offer the following science lesson, which I hope in some small way will help raise the level of scientific literacy in our rapidly sinking nation.

 Electricity Simplified

A Science Lecture by Yerffej N. Flow, Ph.D.

    Our topic is electricity. Electricity makes our modern world run. Everyone should understand it but only few do. When you finish reading this, you will know all there is to know about electricity and will be able to count yourself among a privileged few, the electrically connected cognoscenti.

Prehistoric folks did not have electricity. Well, they did but they didn’t know what to do with it. It is well documented in cave paintings how a caveman of great repute named Hrrrrrmph Toog, upon being struck by lightning, became the world’s first 4 million watt fluorescent lighting fixture. Unfortunately, he was unable to comment upon his distinctive achievement afterward.

There are lots of modern theories about electricity. One says that electricity is 98.7% cream of mushroom soup, but we’ll choose the easiest one because it’s…easy. It says that electricity is made up of something called charge. Charge is carried on little particles called electrons and protons, which are stored in cat fur and received by you from MasterCard in the form of a monthly bill with 18.5% interest. Electrons carry negative charge and protons carry positive charge. It could be the other way around, but I forget.

Quiz Question #1 (multiple choice):

Electrons are:

1. Oblong
2. Protons
3. Really, really tiny

Electric charge doesn’t generally do us much good unless it’s moving. When it isn’t, it’s called static electricity. When it is, it’s called electric current. Current flows through “conductors”. It’s blocked by “insulators”. Wire is a conductor. Wood is an insulator. Rubber is a contraceptive.

Quiz Question #2 (true or false): A large number of electrons flowing through a conductor will electrocute him.

Remember the last time you were at a football game? Remember stuffing your way through some dark, bowelly tunnel to get into the stadium? Remember how you got all sweaty? Aha! You’ve just learned the principle of the toaster oven. Or a light bulb. Those cute, cuddly little electrons (people), all sqwoooshed together in the heating element or lighting filament (bowelly tunnel), create heat that makes the wire glow. Your toaster oven toasts, your light bulb lights, all so you can munch golden brown nuts ‘n berry bread toast and read USA Today bathed in the warm glow of a merry hundred watter instead of eating cold gruel in the dark. The wonders of science, revealed!

As you can see, electricity is actually quite simple. And important. It is a little-known fact that all modern electrical devices, from radios to the space shuttle, are just combinations of toaster ovens and light bulbs. The trick is in knowing the proportions.

Next time, we’ll discuss microwave ovens, fertility and alien abduction. Class dismissed.

Note: Yerffej N. Flow received his Ph.D. with negative honors from the Oxford (shoe) University in 2011. He prefers to be called “Doctor”, but not by sick people.

© J. Allan Wolf, 2015

By now, you’ve all gotten used to my periodic diatribes against Republican arrogance, ignorance, and economic elitism, so it won’t surprise you that here’s another one.

One of the most fundamental flaws in our legislative process is the ability to put any sort of rider on a bill, relevance to the primary bill being a non-issue. And so it has been that the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, to which any more moderate leaning Republicans kowtow, has blocked funding for the Department of Homeland Security by insisting on a provision invalidating President Obama’s recent actions on immigration. Never mind that that action was taken because Congress has consistently failed to address immigration. The Republicans have no plan (and even appear overtly hostile toward immigrants), and the Democrats are wimps who seem to stand for nothing and certainly aren’t actively, vocally supporting the President. The Republicans have thus shown themselves to care more about immigration than the overall security of the United States against all forms of threat, including terrorism.

With that position, Republicans are batting a thousand on general irrationality and the willingness to put the nation at risk. Here are some other areas where the Republicans are actively seeking to destroy the country:

• Health insurance: No plan of their own but hostile to the Affordable Care Act. If they succeed in getting it overturned, millions will end up uninsured again.
• Minimum wage: They’re opposed, fully invested in keeping the economic underclass down
• Abortion: Almost universally opposed and would be happy to see women dying in back alley abortions as they strive to legislate against responsible pregnancy termination and choice.
• Gay marriage: Oh, yeah, they think it’s a religious abomination and want to impose their views on you, too.
• The environment: Absolute opposition to environmental protection, instead favoring ecologic devastation by big business. Maybe they think the Rapture will save them, and damn everyone else.
• Hostility toward, and general disbelief in, science: The earth is 6000 years old? Evolution is just a “theory”? The scientifically ignorant don’t understand the actual meaning of the word “theory” as applied to scientific fact. Worse, some of their ignorance seems downright willful.
• Separation of church and state: Republicans have become an American Taliban, eager to impose their own notion of the U.S. as a Christian nation and ignoring the Founding Fathers’ firm stance against precisely what these historical dopes are promoting.
• Global climate change: Idiots like Senator James Inhof, totally ignorant of science and the considered opinion of every reputable climate scientist on Earth, fail completely to understand and/or accept the reality that is observable to anyone who isn’t a moron. Overall, the planet is warming, oceans are rising, and disaster is becoming a looming certainty.

I could go on, but the essence of current day Republican philosophy is its absolute reliance upon a stratified class system, with a permanently disadvantaged underclass, a contracted middle class, and a small but dominant upper class that can’t see beyond the end of its own economic nose. The Koch brothers et al. have essentially bought Congress, and we are now living in a corporate nation with rapidly eroding social mobility and freedom. Environmental destruction is already occurring and, under incompetent and self-interested leadership, appears headed for much worse in the relatively near future. Voter suppression, continuation of policies that prevent social advancement, and the use of religion and unbridled chauvinism to justify all manner of bigotry and in-your-bedroom legislation are destroying the ideals we, as a country, have in the past and (at least many of us) continue to espouse.

If we don’t wake up to the reality of the situation soon and militate for change, it’s going to be too late. When totalitarian repression becomes too great, people revolt, and I fear the day this could happen in what is supposed to be the land of the free and home of the brave.

It’s February, and the weather in Southern California, where I live, is delightful. Temperatures in the 70s, light breezes, and little to no rain so far in what should be our wettest month. It’s a terrible state of affairs.

All reputable scientists agree that we are living in a world with rapidly changing climate, and that a major, if not the major contributor to the change is the burning of fossil fuels, with release of massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Other contributors, such as the loss of forests due to logging and other development, and the effect of paved cities with heat retaining structures, also play a role, albeit a lesser one. Of course, it also must be acknowledged that climate change can and does occur as a natural event but, all evidence indicates, it’s not the major factor in what we are currently witnessing.

It is unfortunate that the term “global warming” has often been used as a synonym for climate change. Even though it is demonstrably true that the planetary warming is occurring, it does not mean that every place on Earth is warming at the same rate, or that extremes of temperature, both hot and cold, are not part of the process. That is why the term “climate change” is more accurate. 2014 was the hottest year on record for the world as a whole, but not, for example in the Midwestern U.S., which suffered a monstrously cold winter.

Unfortunately, we in the U.S. live in a country plagued by large scale public ignorance about science, and an unwillingness to see the handwriting on the wall. Somehow, ignoramuses like Senator James Inhof (R., Oklahoma), still insist that climate change is a “hoax”. Even otherwise intelligent people (some of whom I know and with whom I’ve argued the issue) refuse to accept the science. And then, there are those who either think their God will take care of the matter or that the Rapture is coming anyway, so there’s no need to do anything about the fact that things are going to get much worse unless we start addressing the problem now.

How much worse? Consider what’s in store for us, our children, and our grandchildren:

• Increasingly violent storm activity: This is already evident both in this country and around the world.
• Continued melting of polar ice resulting in rising sea levels: This will cause not only the disappearance of certain islands and inundation of coastal areas, but will force massive migration to escape flooding. This will cause increased national and international tensions. Violence is likely.
• Major threats to U.S. national security: A recent article in Rolling Stone magazine by Jeff Goodell describes the current high level of concern by U.S. military officials over the failure to address climate change. Loss of coastal bases (e.g., the Norfolk navy yard) will cost the U.S billions as it tries to build new bases. Loss of our major base on Diego Garcia, an island in the southern Indian Ocean, will markedly reduce our southern Asian presence and influence.
• Threat to U.S. economic interests: With Arctic ice melting rapidly, a “Northwest Passage” above Canada is rapidly becoming a reality. Failure to develop ships with reinforced hulls (including dedicated icebreakers) is already compromising our ability to be a presence in the area, one rich in natural resources and where Russia and China will certainly increase their presence in years to come.
• Loss of water: Increasing drought resulting from climate change will decrease potable water supplies. This will be exacerbated by pollution secondary to overpopulation and poverty-related poor sanitation, and by unrestrained corporate pollution. The end result will be a massive shortage of both water, itself, and potable water specifically. This will result in an increase in the prevalence of both infectious diseases and cancer, not to mention violence in “water wars”.

Congress, under the influence of ignorant, self-interested leaders abetted by the short term influx of corporate money, is not even beginning to face up to the coming realities. The Republican Party seems to have become a de facto subsidiary of Koch Industries, and Democrats aren’t taking responsibility either. This is all depressing and inducive of a sense of foreboding. I’d like to be optimistic, to think that Congress will come to its senses and enact measures to reduce the impact of a process already begun but still able to be moderated. Unfortunately, I see no signs of it happening right now.

About all we can do is continue to try and get the word out, to support and elect only those people to Congress who “get it”. But it remains that until – unless – the public demands action, it simply isn’t going to happen, and woe to our descendants, who will live in a world beyond rescue.

2015: a new year that has begun under a dark cloud. It is the cloud of religious intolerance taken to murderous extreme, and we should all be outraged.

Followers of this blog know my feelings about religion, in general. If, when I was young, I was hesitant about admitting my humanistic philosophy and atheism, I’ve lost all inhibitions about doing so now that I’m older. To paraphrase, frankly my dear readers, I don’t give a damn, and if people like me can’t speak up, then what’s the first amendment for? Ah! Freedom of speech. Something we tend to take for granted or, unfortunately, as a couple of letters in this morning’s L.A. Times (one ignoramus actually referring to the Jewish “race”) distressingly reveal, rejected or forgotten.

The recent mass murder in Paris, then, is about more than just radical Islamism, although that’s certainly its foundation. But it’s one thing to have radical religious views and quite another to kill people by acting upon them. The three terrorists who committed the slaughter may have been acting from the fundamentalist base of their religion, but what they actually were doing was expressing in the most violent of ways their ideal of a religious totalitarianism, where to voice or publish any unorthodox view is a capital crime. Sadly, much of the world has neither a sense of humor nor respect for any view unacceptable to self-righteous absolutism.

Religion has brought much beautiful art, architecture, and music to the world, and in some cases even expressed worthy thoughts about how life should be lived. On the other hand, history is full of dysfunctional, cruel, and intolerant religious expression, and I would argue that not all the art, music, or moral exhortations outweigh the extraordinary damage done by religion over the centuries.

The murderous ignorance that led to the recent massacre in Paris was not just an attack upon a satirical publication. It was an attack upon us all. All of us who treasure freedom of thought, of expression, and the ability to walk the streets in safety, secure in our beliefs whatever they may be, should be appalled by what has happened. By what is happening all around the world and not only in Paris. And if the rest of the world does not stand up and say, enough, and work with all its might to put an end to religious bigotry, ignorance, and resultant terrorism, then we will all be to blame for what went down in the offices of Charlie Hebdo. In other words, the world must act because nous sommes tous Charlie.