sex – Page 6 – Hopeful Romantics

The Life and Times of the Counterfeit Erection

The head of the Intellectual Property Investigation Bureau for the Hong Kong Customs Office, recently reported that eighty percent of the counterfeit drugs seized are used to treat impotence. This means that despite all the diseases out there that require treatment, from heart disease to restless leg syndrome, the main concern is penis performance. The heart arteries could be blocked, and the diabetes count could be four hundred and change; lungs could be like toasted marshmallows from years of cigarette smoke, and the brain riddled with mad cow disease, but if the penis works, then all is well with the world.

Stiffening the penis is big money wherever you look. Between the lap dances and the porn sites, the sex junkets to Thailand, even the somewhat tame Victoria’s Secret Catalog, much of the international marketing thrust is designed for Chubby. There are colognes promising sex attraction through Pheromones and monkey sweat. There are any number of herbs and foods considered to be aphrodisiacs. Where the penis is concerned, the world is its oyster. We are not talking a few bucks here We are talking mega-billions.

In fact the manufacture and sale of imitation Viagra and other such drugs used to treat erectile dysfunction generates more profits than any other drug sold in China. Much of it is also exported. But there is for the world wide boner effort, plenty of pills to go around. Viagra and Cialis are the two most pervasive counterfeit drugs confiscated by customs officials. Needless to say, these drugs are not regulated, so they either consist of harmful adulterants that can give the user damaging side effects, or they are merely placebos that have little affect whatsoever. In all, it is a gamble that most customers are willing to take. The hope of a hard on is more promising than the fear of, say, a liver disease.

I find this remarkable on at least one level. The fact that consumers will take health risks for elusive or ephemeral benefits is really unremarkable. In fact, it is commonplace. People will use Botox in spite of some of the possible nerve damage it can cause. They will smoke, drink, take drugs to excess. They will have themselves peeled and snipped and will disregard any possible dangers. Hell, they will overlook all the warning signs of transmittable disease and come closing time go home with a disaster just waiting to happen. So, I suppose, why not at least have a pharmacological erection to accommodate that ill fated night you may long remember?

No, nothing remarkable about this. What is remarkable is the fact that after hundreds and even thousands of years of the Chinese pursuit of the heavenly hard on, they are resorting to Western medicine to achieve their desired erections. All those centuries of eating everything from deer antler, tiger penis, bear bladder, and even gall stones has not compared to the majestic little blue pill. Or the yellow one. So has all the years of imbibing Shark’s Fin Soup, Bull Dick and Testicle Soup, Ginseng, Rhino’s Horn, Sea Cucumber and Bird’s Nest Soup not produced the results that we were led to believe? One has to wonder if the desire for Western treatment for erectile dysfunction is because all that other crap doesn’t work, or it is largely the notion that downing Tiger Penis is a much tougher project than swallowing one small pill. Even with hot sauce, it is hard to imagine what culinary delights the Tiger Penis has to offer. Common sense would dictate it’s a lot easier to take the Viagra or Cialis and leave room in your stomach for some veggie fried rice or a nice, juicy steak. But then the exotic lure of Tiger Penis is something that has escaped me, to date, so maybe there is in the end an acquired taste.

Chinese medicine has been venerated for a fair number of years. Skeptics of Western medical practices, and there should be, believe me, have often extolled the virtue of Chinese Medicine. We are not just talking acupuncture here, but the herbs and foods that offer curative power. Chinese medicine is regarded highly in holistic circles as both reputable and in certain ways advanced in its understanding of the human body and the way certain diseases should be treated. I have used Chinese Medicine. So why, when there are nine million herbs, body parts, food sources and whatever that are over the centuries devoted to raising a woody, have the Chinese decided to eschew all that and switch over to the pill?

Perhaps it is the nifty commercials where a boomer band sits around singing “Viva Viagra,” at the top of its bar band lungs as if a group grope at closing time is their collective reward for playing bad cover songs. Or the kinder and gentler Cialis commercials where “when the moment is right for you.” Yeah, like painting a room might suddenly inspire the two of you to put down the rollers and climb down off of that ladder. I have wondered if the suggestion behind double bathtub commercial is that once the Cialis takes hold of Johnny Wonder it will drill through one tub into the other. Better than Popeye’s spinach.

You would think with all the Viagra buying, the Chinese would have a lot of sex on their minds. The idea of buying counterfeit Viagra, or Cialis, or Levitra, for that matter, I would think is to keep the cost down. If you are messing around just here and there, what’s few bucks more for the real thing. Okay, one reason for buying counterfeit may be the confidentiality. In China, where losing face, or whatever, is a big issue, the Chinese man may want to keep it on the low down that his thingie ain’t working. It’s not like here where we are not only singing about it, but bragging to our friends.
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Perhaps it is a quantitative thing and Chinese men have become a bunch of horny souls who thanks to the national surge in their economy are looking for love in all the wrong places. It could be they went from the bitterness of short money and a lot of starvation to feeling flush everywhere but down below. Deer Antler letting you down? Try Cialis. So there in the need for quantity comes forth the need for economy. Viagra and such is expensive. Counterfeit pills have to be a lot cheaper. But then it is more than a tad ironic that a nation trying to retain population control is defying the odds of pregnancy that is strongly propagated by an insistent erection.

But the Chinese have for at least the modern age been largely a prudish nation. Movies are often censored. National policy forbids pornography. Yet when it comes to illegal brothels the government looks the other way. Usually, the illegal brothels are fronted by a hair salon. What a rude awakening for the unsuspecting soul ventures there for a cut and perm. And since the “hair salons” proliferate Chinese cities, perhaps a pocketful of Viagra is necessary to just to work your way down the block.

In fairness, every nation has had its aphrodisiacs. There are oysters, chili, dog meat, yes, dog meat, more oysters,ginkgo, turtle eggs, and the skink. After awhile, it seems just about everything but liquor and ice cream will help men get it up. Of course, Western culture being what it is, nothing makes more sense than a single pill you pop an hour before your are ready to roll of the sofa and turn off the TV. Can’t argue with that.

Although there are certain Westerners who are taking issue with the Viagra culture. As the Daily Beast has dubbed them The Viagra Brigade, here are the women who at a certain age have had their sex drives diminished to levels of a more sedentary convenience. Now here they are, content to pursue other interests, coping with a horny husband. Some of these men make increased demands on these women, depending on the size of the prescription. And some go astray, complicating long term relationships by jumping the reservation and heading for the younger women world for that one last time around.

Geezers with an attitude. And then there are the younger women who married the wealthier older man for security, companionship, and a lot of nice things his money could buy her. Sex wasn’t really part of the package. but now she suddenly has to perform. Talk about an inconvenient truth.

Maybe had a way of telling us to slow down. Maybe, in the original master plan, with aging we were not about to reproduce so there was not much need for erections. Maybe, after a certain point, the penis may be working with a little help from its friends, but the rest of us is not quite up to snuff. There are aches and pains. The aging body hurts just when you get up in the morning, yet alone when you are having sex. So maybe we are in defiance of nature and the master plan.

But then again, maybe not. Maybe the crap we put into our systems that we call food creates diabetes and assorted ailments that are well known to cause erectile dysfunction. It’s possible being obese or a least a couple dozen pounds overweight may have something to do with the way the blood travels through the body. Maybe the sedentary life and our self-absorptions, preoccupations and worries, real and imagined, impair the sexual reflect. One could justify that screwing in the face of age and adversity is a grand act of defiance and of telling impending mortality to kiss our collective ass. Maybe after the BMW and the decorator everything sex and its resultant pleasure is one of the only things that really matters. After all, we have how many sexual thoughts per hour? I have long lost track.

So for the horny Chinese and the horny rest of us around the world, if you can’t take the heat, stay in the kitchen. Viva Viagra. If nothing else, it is one of the few things in this world that actually works.

Los Angeles is the Hollywood Sign

Los Angeles has always been a city of contradictions. For one thing, most of its citizens share a love hate relationship with the city. It is a Western City, populated at first by New Yorkers and Mid-Westerners, and now with people from every part of the globe. It is an American city with an Hispanic past. Its major products are agrarian, technology, and dreams.

It has been ridiculed of its tackiness and referred to as Tinsel Town. Yet with the suburbanization of most cities in America, with their endless grids of unremarkable houses in predictable tracts all punctuated by a series of shopping malls and big box stores, the City of Los Angeles, has become incredibly unique to itself. On one hand when you live in Los Angeles you are aware that this may be the vanguard of American living. If only the rest of America didn’t despise us so much. You live here at the far end of America. When you visit anywhere else you feel more like you have been living on the moon.

The City of the Angels one of the most populous urban areas in the nation. Yet it’s odd and endless grids are offset by a large array of year round foliage, replete with any number of exotic plants, desert vegetation, oaks, maples, Bougainvillea, Jacaranda, and the occasional Willow. The houses themselves are a flurry and mix and match of architectural types, with Tudors standing next door to Spanish Mission, next to mid century modern, next to the sleek, contemporary pronouncements of the twenty first century. All encapsulated by an endless ribbon of freeways, highways, boulevards, and narrow, winding canyon roads. A city with extreme wealth and extreme poverty, luxury landscapes and urban blight, all embraced by the Pacific Ocean to the West and Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountain ranges to its north and east.

LA has probably the worst urban gridlock. It is a once flat city going high rise. Yet in some parts of the city urban sprawl is being witnessed by decidedly non-urban creatures like deer and coyote. This is in addition to the opossums, snakes and wildcats, vying for space with major street gangs and gangs of paparazzi. It is some mix, and confused chroniclers of the city have labored for years to analyze the contradictions.

In my twenties, I remember when the richest part of Beverly Hills, the rich flats resplendent then with celebrities and wealthy replicants of the post-Ozzie and Harriet era, living just across the street from the Wonder Bread Factory. Here were houses envied by much of a nation, to say nothing of the Beverly Hills City Hall and Police Station, all enduring the smell of sugar and yeast from what was then the biggest bread maker in the country.

Los Angeles has long been denigrated for its lack of culture and abundance of nut jobs. But meanwhile, it has long been the political sanctuary for creative refugees, be it the Mexican artists, fleeing the Mexican Revolution, or the Europeans fleeing Hitler’s scourge. Despite the long standing and tired joke that the main culture here is in yogurt, the art scene flourishes as one of the most dynamic in the world. There are many literary luminaries living here, and a media and entertainment center it is second to none. As for the nut jobs, there are many, but the city’s financial and legal centers impact greatly the economics of Asia Pacific and global economics in general.

LA is the world-wide capital for self absorption. It is a powerful city, where many adults still dress like children. Yet it is for the most part a bastion of liberal politics, and more ethnically diverse than just about any other city. LA is a city where people don’t care much about your background, the color of your skin and to which religion you cast your prayers. They care instead about what you do and what you drive. They care about how you look and what you wear, and whether you are smart enough to seize on opportunity when it air kisses your front door.

So it is small wonder, that at least part of the consciousness of Los Angeles would be symbolized by the Hollywood Sign. Why is this a contradiction? At least for a city that likes to knock things down and build things new things in their place, thus reinventing itself and nullifying history, the temporarily constructed Hollywood sign remains a part of our permanent history. But maybe not for long.

They further explain that the time period cheapest levitra generic http://www.molineanimalaid.org/index-3 of 24 hours is completed you can then go for the second pill. Presence of catechin is the highlighting feature of brand levitra green tea. Kamagra have been an innovate discovery of the health experts buy cialis generic of Food & Drug Association (FDA). As you cheap super cialis age, you might require more jolts and a stretched out term of time to keep up an acceptable erection. The Hollywood Sign sits on Mt. Lee. It was constructed initially in 1923. It wasn’t built to honor Hollywood, movie capital of the world. No. The sign was an advertisement for a new building development known as Hollywoodland. The sign was studded with light bulbs, some 40,000 in all. It was garish and tacky, so very LA.

In 1949 the City Council in its great wisdom ordered the “land” part of the sign to be removed so it could become the enduring symbol of the center of the earth, as least as far as the motion picture industry was concerned. But structures made of wood and sheet metal were not meant to endure, and the sign fell in and out of disrepair. Its durability wasn’t helped any when people crashed their cars into it, vandalized it, and even jumped from it; as in one case where a failed and forlorn Hollywood actress jumped from the letter “H.”

Like many actors of a certain age, the sign may have looked good from a distance, but up close it was looking aged and worn, and perhaps only worth advertising that the once glamorous Hollywood proper was now populated by hookers and junkies, and tourists still gaping at the concrete feet of celebrities outside of Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

In 1978, the sign was in such disrepair that the city launched a fund raising drive to replace the letters. In steel. At the time, the cost of replacement was $250,000 or so. Alice Cooper donated a new letter “O” along with his manager at the time, Shep Gordon. To garner donations, pieces of the old sign were embedded in Lucite and sold or given away. A friend gave me one of those, and to this day it still adorns one of my bookshelves. Despite the passing of years, I still find it oddly reassuring, a relic of accidental permanence in an impermanent environment.

More work was done on the sign in 2005 and 2006. Like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, it needs maintenance.

So where is the big contradiction? Okay, if it is not a contradiction, then its is surely ironic. The Hollywood Sign started out as an advertisement for a housing development. And now, Fox River Financial Resources, Inc, wants to disrupt its solitary presence by putting up a housing development on the 138 acres of surrounding land. The real estate development will either jeopardize the Hollywood Sign or make it awfully damned ugly to look at with a bunch of houses in its perimeter.

The City of Los Angeles and its Trust for Public Land has but three more days to raise an additional $2.8 million of the $12 Million in total needed to buy the land from Fox River, which bought it from the Hughes estate in 2002 for $1.7 Million. A nice profit. For what Los Angeles considers one of its historical treasures.

Personally, I want to see the sign saved. A few luxury houses on the mountain crest will hardly substitute for the sheer beauty of the mountainous area, a rare bit of space unmolested by our problematic need to build on every piece of vacant land. As these are to be four luxury houses developed on this parcel, the abusively rich can find another place to park their ass. We would miss the sign, but hardly the cretins intent on their fiefdoms. The Hollywood Sign, after all, does symbolize Los Angeles.

The Enduring Easter Bunny Fetish

I was going to write something more serious when my eye caught a photo on the Sunday Los Angeles Times where two security guards were trying to wrest a large plastic trash bag from the hands of one of the prodigious street vendors working the downtown area. The large plastic trash bag was filled with rabbits. Easter rabbits.

It would make sense that come the Easter Holiday, rabbits would be a featured attraction in the hustling market area known as Santee Alley. Santee Alley is roughly ten square blocks and is centered by the alley itself where clustered stalls offer the shopper everything from cheap toys and electronics, to knock off designer jeans and counterfeit designer wallets and handbags, and the ubiquitous bootleg DVD’s. And animals. On any given day iguanas and large, green turtles are offered for sale, with the occasional chicken or rooster.

The vendors are a polyglot of ethnic diversity, a regular lower shelf market bazaar where unclaimed shipments from China and irregular offloads compete with the counterfeit accessories to attract the passersby. To be kind, Santee Alley is not typically filled with high earners, unless they are slumming or looking for the odd bargain on counterfeit purses they don’t mind carrying to buffer the bad economy while still impressing their friends. It is more the working class shopping mecca, mothers in toy with their multiple children, the in-laws and grandparents tootling on behind.

On weekends, the Santee Alley area is seriously crowded and to enter the Alley itself one does the slow shopping shuffle. Some vendors will proffer their wares, and others may whisper that lurking inside the canvas duffel bags or plastic garbage bags in the back of the stall some fine counterfeit handbags, wallets, jeans, DVD’s and whatever are waiting for your perusal. Some will claim they come from the same manufacturer as the original authentic designer version. Some are too bored to bother with any conceivable ruse.

But it is Easter time and there are rabbits. People often ask how rabbits came into the Easter story, but I have no definitive idea. Something about fertility, as with the eggs, those painted eggs, signifying fertility and renewal. If rabbits laid eggs it would be an easier legend to comprehend. But they don’t. So suffice it to say the fertility aspect of Easter is left to both mammals and fowl, humans notwithstanding. Humans having sex and multiplying, despite all Biblical notions, is something to be kept on the quiet. Even if the concept of human sex oddly is an obscure notion given the large families in Santee Alley.

But to the rabbits. So here are the rabbits in little cages, being offered for sale at the going rate of $20 apiece. That seems expensive, but then I am hardly the rabbit farmer of legend. In fact in my youth and relative innocence I had one bunny that I kept over Easter and then gave back to the pet store, once I discovered all rabbits really do is wiggle their noses and crap round turds just about everywhere they travel. But my brief rabbit ownership came a long time ago when the information network was confined to pretty much what your parents told you and what Cold War events were delivered on only three television stations. In one’s ignorance about esoteric things about rabbits and such, one just went with the flow until self-discovery changed the course of direction.

Of course these were the times when pet shops and farmers markets sold painted turtles and spray painted chickens, all done up in Easter colors of pink and yellow. For the most part, the whole Easter chicken and rabbit business was a genocide program. The dyes in the spray paint would usually kill the baby chicks soon after sale. Although I did have one friend who actually raised the chicken to maturity. It was so odd seeing a grown chicken living in a console television box in the basement of a row house. It was if nothing else a marked testament to survival.
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The turtles were year round and survived longer, despite the garish colored images that were spray painted on their shells. Longer here is a relative issue, as was survival. Everyone I knew had a story about the dog or cat eating the baby chicks and rabbits, or giving the rabbits to the neighbors where it was eaten for dinner the following night. The turtles would escape from their plastic bowls and either be eaten by the cats or lost to the crevices in the house or found a week later a victim of the rinse cycle on the washing machine.

But that was long ago. For the most part I thought the whole Easter Bunny fetish was long gone, along with the painted baby chicks, as the society has advanced and had access to information regarding the health and well being of these long eared creatures. I guess not. According to the Times article, the Bunny trade is booming. These are young rabbits that are not weaned and suffering from malnutrition. In all, buying one of these rabbits and taking it home gives a whole new meaning to dead on arrival.

But, either way, once purchased for the Big Easter pageant, the Easter Bunny is in for a real rough time. He is either DOA, perhaps a mercy killing given the choices. Or the rabbit who lives through the rigors of the holiday season may ultimately face extermination when he wears out his welcome. Perhaps as the main course for a Saturday dinner, if he miraculously manages to grow plump and mature.

The Los Angeles Security Guards and law enforcement authorities try their best to rein in the illegal Easter Bunny Business. They rescue these poor creatures and place them in a shelter where they at least have a chance to survive. The rabbits are fed kitten formula and colostrum pills. The ubiquitous lettuce the condemned rabbits are seen nibbling on ever so cutely will destroy the system of young rabbits.

Oh well…rabbits and lettuce…another myth all shot to hell. So this is pretty serious, after all. Happy Easter.

Puppetry of the Pearly Penile Papules

For many years now, the running commentary is that a man’s penis has a mind of its own. Or we have heard it said that the little head is in command of the big head. Maybe so. Maybe not.

But here is a case where a man’s penis should have maybe done the thinking for him. Apparently the big head was cajoled and pressured into thrusting the little head into public scrutiny, where both person and penis were met with derisive comments and otherwise embarrassing results.

According to an article the Courthouse News Service, a man has filed a complaint against CBS Television Network. The man alleges the producers of the reality show, “The Doctors” tricked him into discussing his laser surgery before a live studio audience. The laser surgery was intended to remove “pearly penile papules.” Pearly penile papules are seemingly harmless skin colored bumps or pimples that I’m sure do little to enhance one’s sex appeal.

The man contends that he contacted the doctor at the surgery center, in La Jolla, California, for an appointment to consult about this $4,500 surgery. A couple of days later, the would-be patient received a call from “The Doctors” requesting he appear on the show. The offended party contends that he was unduly pressured into appearing on the show. He wasn’t told about the live studio audience. The show was broadcast, he alleges, without his consent.

The man now claims he has suffered “relentless embarrassment and harassment.” He claims he receives less than complimentary phone calls and emails from friends and acquaintances who have commented on his television debut. We can only imagine the content of the voice mails and emails, but there is little doubt they can prove unnerving.

Honestly, I feel bad for the guy. He may have a case.; he may not. He may have been tricked or he may have imagined himself aglow in the light of celebrity. I don’t know. Television producers in need of willing and gullible subjects can be very persuasive. They can work their charms and hammer you in every way until your relinquish yourself to their programming needs.

In the mood of the times, it is flattering at first that you Joe Blow from wherever are suddenly a point of focus. It can bring some distraction to your everyday life. People will notice you. In a bad economy with jobs outsourced and not all that many prospects out there, you could make yourself famous. It’s like marathon dancing during the Great Depression. A long shot. And often painful.

One should be very generic viagra online careful while using these tablets. kamagra tablets does not protect against STDs (sexual transmitted diseases) like HIV. But still I viagra for cheap prices think there is some increment. He would tell you many stories regarding general medicines price tadalafil tablets but you should insist on buying generic drugs only. Tadalafil has no effect on libido partners, influencing the level of increase in blood flow in to the penis when it is stimulated therefore developing and sustaining sildenafil 100mg canada an erection. But long shot or not, if you play your cards right there is that glimmer of hope you can parley your media appearance into some profit making marketing scheme. Look at those men and women who could parley a self-made porn video into a branding institution. There are any number, Paris Hilton not being the least of whom started out blurry and naked on a DIY video. There are the ones who utter something stupid, but that stupid utterance somehow resonates with a certain market segment who prints it on tee shirts and coffee mugs. There are book offers and breakfast cereal, maybe all in one package.

So when life is drab and your money is short, when Hollywood calls you may want to consider the possibilities. This is the age, after all, were privacy woefully lacks the currency it once had. In a bad economy, especially, you can’t make yourself rich and famous by secreting your most intimate biases, dreams, and sexual proclivities. Just walk down the street or stand on any elevator where someone is yammering away about their love life and not-so-secret desires. Do they care that you are standing around wondering what kind of imbecile makes all this known to the public? Not in the least. Either they don’t care or they want you to look at them, take notice, think of them as someone engaged in a life more exotic than its somber reality.

Integrity and decorum have long fallen by the wayside as the multitudes seek to gain the advantage over their peers by exhibiting themselves in some absurd fashion, by having more babies, uttering believed to be metaphysical by some and nonsense to the dwindling quantity of discerning minds. Couple this was the fact that most people are in fact functionally illiterate, so signing away their life on documents they are unable to read is more commonplace than ever before. They buy houses, cars, and get involved in get rich quick schemes by passing over the fine print. They claim in the aftermath that they were victimized by virtue that they were either incapable or too lazy to read the documents with which they were presented.

The quest for fame is even greater than the quest for sex. Both may be ephemeral and ultimately unsatisfying, but the quest for celebrity in this day and age is the strongest urge. The quest for celebrity emanates from conditions of alienation and anonymity. More often than not the feeling of one’s loneliness and insignificance can only be sated when not one but thousand or millions of eyes turn their eyes away from their iPhones and cast them onto you.

For that brief recognition people will subject themselves to damn near anything. They will have sex with animals or talk about their worst moments to their twenty million best friends. They will humiliate themselves at every level and willingly swap their dignity for celebrity with only the slightest bit of prompting. Where there once was a time where you had to pry out someone’s innermost secrets, in quest of celebrity you can’t shut them up.

What is remarkable is that someone who finds the cure for AIDS will have the same amount of celebrity as, say, the Octomom. There is no discrimination. Famous is famous. We may claim otherwise, but it’s not the truth. They are here and they are gone. Unless they manage in some way through some gift of accomplishment or media savvy to sustain our fickle attentions. Otherwise, they are off the show and back on their cell phones, pumping up their inflated sense of accomplishment.

Nature’s Way of Sorting Out the Environment

I was reading a recent article in the Los Angeles Times about how the cold spell in Florida is killing many of the nonnative animal life. Burmese Pythons and African Rock Pythons are buying the farm on a major scale. Iguanas are falling dead from trees. Nonnative fish are dying by the thousands. The Mayan cichlid, walking catfish, and spotfin spiny eel, are among the fish floating lifeless to the water’s surface.

I would take this to mean that this is nature’s way of telling these invasive animals to get the hell out of where they don’t belong. Not that they had a choice in the matter, as many were brought over on ships, or in the case of the snakes, they were former pets that were let go in the Everglades when the novelty wore off or when the hurricane deposited their former domiciles on FEMA’s statistical list of trash. Nevertheless, these animals who thrive in the warmer climes of he tropics will only thrive so long when the temperature takes a dramatic turn.

Yes, I would take this as part of nature’s way of rearranging the order of things. I have to wonder what else does nature have in store for us. We are inundated with dire predictions about global warming, which is not global warming, really, but dramatic climate change. What’s this mean? It means that not everything will warm up, but in places that are already warm, it will probably get warmer still. In the colder spots on the climate, it may get colder still.

Yet the Arctic is melting and Florida has a cold spell. Who knows what is really going on? What I do know is that things change. I have stood in places up on the high desert of Four Corners, Monument National Valley and further North. It is hard rock, bone dry. Yet in places you can still see actual dinosaur footprints in what is now rock or really hard ground. Dinosaur footprints. I kid you not. This is the legacy of an earlier time when this vast region was under water, either covered by seawater or vast marshes that prevailed for millions of years.

Things change. As a civilization that wants to believe that all things are safe and permanent, we have yet to get the memo that the planet is ever changing and in doing so is making things more or less secure at his own universal discretion. Or in reaction to the conditions we inflict upon our planet.

Suffice it to say that while some of the global changes my be cyclical, it still doesn’t mean it is a good idea to pollute the hell out of it. You can’t treat the Earth like a rental car and expect it to run smoothly. Common sense would have it that dumping poisons into our water, filling our air with toxic crap, and leaving piles of waste on our lands and in our oceans will hardly result in something positive. Common sense would say if you put poison in water then you will poison yourself when you drink the water, and poison the fish that live in that water. Who you will eat.

In short, global warming may not be a result of our human transgressions, but our human transgressions aren’t helping things either. No matter how long we care to live in denial. You do not have to tie natural cycles and human pollution together to validate the fact the planet is going through changes. Planetary cycles can still take effect, regardless of human pollution. But for sure as hell, human pollution is not going to improve the situation, any. Poison the oceans, the fresh water and the landscape, and it is still poisoned, whether there is climate change or not. Common sense should bear that out.

But, unfortunately, common sense is not so common. It took certain people hundreds if not thousands of years to realize that crapping upstream and drinking the same water downstream will result in disease. People in some spots took thousands of years to correlate sex with the making of babies. In some places on the globe, it seems it is still the case. Recognizing the existence of germs took awhile.

And then there is the money factor. There are those who are making money and those who are making more money by ignoring the obvious. It is cost effective n the short run to ignore the obvious. If you take the precautions and impose the industrial standards to eliminate or reduce pollution it will cost you bucks in the short run. This cuts into your bottom line. The bottom line in America and most countries is the major modern religion and messing with the bottom line for the sake of such minor considerations as the welfare of humanity borders on sacrilege.

Then there are the people who are allegedly in power. The legislators. What was once a somewhat responsible body of lawmakers who tried to oversee the well being of their constituents, looks more like a group of small time hustlers, working the corridors of government for their next corporate handout. With some exception, most are being paid by their keepers to assure us that all is well and that they are maintaining “our way of life.” They are paid to nod their heads and look the other way, examining their purses and the prospects of future elections, which more often than not conflicts with public interest.

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We leave a lot of things out of any argument. We do this out of convenience. While there are obscure noises about overcrowding, increased strain on an already fragile infrastructure and ecosystem, we don’t talk much about overpopulation. We fear for social and political repercussions when entertain the fact that the world has too many people. We are are overcrowded. Some of the population is undernourished. And most of the population is undereducated and hardly prepared for the next decades of the twenty-first century.

We cover this by talking about the unique quality of every human being and making Hallmark cards of our sentiment, without addressing the true dangers that overpopulation will create. We talk about global warning and claim hundred of millions will die. What we don’t do is say that if we keep flooding this planet with the crushing hordes, it will cause natural reaction. And natural reactions are often grim and consequential.

We cry over an earthquake in Haiti but ignore the fact that overcrowding, ignorance and the rest may well result in a pandemic, the likes of which we have never experienced. Yes, it is a pity for Haiti, but if watching a quarter million die on one small island is nearly unbearable, what will it be like when hundreds of millions, billions, start dying from previously unknown diseases? Diseases for what there will not be a cure.

So we argue out of convenience. Convenience in this case means we pick and choose the safer salient points while leaving out the dozens of considerations that may really cause us harm. We find consolation in sentiment when pressing issues loom before us. We deal in modern day superstitions and embrace the religious either in its traditional form or as some metaphysical salad bar to support whatever half baked theory we are using to confront very real global events.

I would consider that more people have died from ignorance than anything else. Ignorance has led to war, has caused us to crap upstream and drink downstream. We overpopulate out of ignorance of the consequences and how it reduces the general well being of this planet. We declare theory and conjecture as truth and fact, although we have not yet been able to gather all the relevant information. We are ignorant and proud of it.

Will all this happen? It’s probable but not certain. History is often a cruel prognosticator of what life has in store. Historically, civilizations have come and gone. Civilizations here have vanished. There is room to speculate that even on other planets what was once living is now long since dead.

But then there is the other side of the coin. Despite the cold spell in Florida, not every nonnative animal has died. the smaller pythons are surviving, as they are able to adapt by slipping into smaller rock crevices and other spots that may keep them warm enough to ride out of the cold. Only half the green iguanas have succumbed. Maybe it’s dumb iguana luck, or it is Darwin’s Laws of Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest, as it is sometimes known. Or as the more religious will inveigh, it is the hand of divine providence.

I don’t know. In the case of how and why some live and others don’t everyone has a valid opinion. As long as it remains an opinion and isn’t carved in stone as absolute fact.

What we do know is that things chance. Nothing remains the same, whether we want it to, or not. And life goes on.